FO Friday: Medusa Hat

I made myself adult and I did finish my Medusa Hat!

Pattern: My Own basic beanie “recipe” with 88 sts

Needles: US 8s

Yarn: Malabrio Rios in Medusa

This hat used 71 grams of the 100 gram skein. This probably means that I could have made the hat body longer based on my prior hats. When I tried this on, it was a fitted beanie with zero slouch. Which is fine and just means the recipients are more limited. And the silver lining is that I will have plenty of leftovers to finish my Frankenstein hat, lol.

Happy Knitting!!

Medusa Decreases

It’s scorching summer here and we are winding down with swimming lessons for Jellybean. He’s in level 4 and crushing it. Meanwhile I am sweating through my business casual in the slim areas of shade. That water was way to tempting.

It’s been good for my Medusa Hat. I am through the body of this hat and put the DPNs in to start the decreases. I love love love these blips of color in this variegation. The fabric just looks so polished and purposeful.

We still have several lessons to do so I envision this hat coming off the needles this week. Happy Knitting!!

Cast On: Frankenstein #1

I finally cracked and started a Frankenstein hat with my worsted weight leftovers. For this version I picked all my pink/red yarns.

I am making Musselburgh style hat, I cast on using DPNs and then worked square increases out from the center. For no good reason, I started with my English Rose malabrigo and I will knit until it runs out. I am leaning towards to the grey after that followed by the burgundy.

I will knit the hat in a big tube and decrease at the other end to make a musselburgh ish hat will the two layers. My “use all the scraps’ brain is really happy with this. The hat may end up being super weird but it will keep a head warm!

Happy Knitting!!

Medusa Hat Progress

It’s officially back to school season and activities are flying fast around here. So much so that I blew through the folded brim and into the stockinette of my Medusa Hat.

The speckles in this yarn are EVERYTHING that I love right now. Those little flecks I think add some much interest to vanilla hat. I need another 3 inches of hat and then I can start decreases.

My conundrum is for my next hat do I start working on scrappy hats with leftovers or do I wind up some of the worsted yarn I got at SSK? I am still finding my mojo drifting to worsted weight hats as they are quick satisfying and do not require any mental bandwidth.

Happy Knitting!!

SSK Door Prize

One really cool feature of SSK is the simply astronomical number of door prizes that the KnitGirllls are able to source. I’m talking like close to 50 or 60. You win tickets, earn tickets and get some tickets for just attending. And then you can put those into drawing for prizes and I won one!

This was one of the bigger grand prizes. It is a foldie travel bag with two yarn baby skeins of CeCe’s Wool. That is a new to me yarn brand and boy howdie is that a lot of sock yarn! The color is “Over The Raindow” and it’s 2,240 yards of fingering weight sock yarn. It’s also 100% merino. Enough that I can knit a full Rachelle sized sweater!

I am super grateful for winning a prize and I really want to find a sweater to knit but less enthused about a sweater on US 2s or 3s, lol.

What should I knit?

SSK Stitch Markers

I realized some of the things you couldn’t see in my wool pig pile from SSK were the stitch markers I grabbed to add to my collections and a few for gifts.

I am more and more a fan of lobster clips for a variety of reasons. The princess ones will be for PB and the Mario ones will be for Jellybean to play with. The rest are going into my projects bags.

Ooh, and the earrings are definitely going to be a staple in my business casual work rotation!

SSK Stickers

Several of the vendors are SSK also had some vinyl stickers as well as a sticker trade at the SSK check in table. I managed to grab a few.

I grabbed the ADHD and rainbow heart for my mom friend Cindy. They will make great random friend gifts. And the rest I think will be for my collection. I especially liked the “Don’t Confuse Motion with Progress” sticker.

I have been adding stickers to my paper planner each month to add humor, color or cheer to my never ending schedule and to-dos. I think August will be my Superhero yarn ball month…

Happy Knitting!!

SSK Minis For Granny Stripes

Last Friday I showed my SSK Haul and today I wanted to highlight the mini skeins I collected to help fill in color gaps for my granny stripe blanket.

I don’t tend to yellows or oranges so I grabbed a couple of those. And also some darker colors and variegated skeins. I think at least one of them has some sparkle in as well. Another bonus is that my SSK conference swag bag is big enough to fit my growing blanket. So these are added to my big bag of scraps and minis all zipped safely in the new larger project bag.

Now, how do I open up more time in my schedule to craft??

Prism Heels

Traveling has been good for my WIP progress. My Prism Socks are starting to look like socks.

I honestly am a little tired of these socks. The yarn is great and the colors are cheery but I just wanted to be done. So I pulled a mini skein out of granny strip project and got my heels cut in.

I found a tonal black mini that matched fairly well. It was a Red Door Fibers mini from KITH KC 2024. I really like the look of the coordination but man….dark fibers are hard for these eyes! But I made it and now after the heels are done I can just finish the leg/cuff and move on to new projects.

Happy Knitting!!

Cast On: SSK Tweed Hat

The SSK retreat has this cool benefit that for a small donation or tip, they will wind yarn for you with some fancy equipment. I had a skein of what I thought was worsted in my knitting bag and I put into be wound.

When I got it back, I realized it was in fact NOT worsted and actually a sport weight from Red Door Fibers that I picked up from KITH KC 2024. I decided to roll with it. But that meant stopping and doing some calculations to adjust stitch count and needle size for this weight of yarn.

After some maths, I landed on 112 stitches on US 5s. Still thinking a stockinette folded brim followed by a vanilla beanie style. This hat is going decidedly slower with the smaller yarn and more stitches. I think this will migrate to being my work backpack knitting and therefore a slow and stead progress kind of project?

I have another skein of sport wound up in cake that needs knit up. So if this works, I will get that skein into my project queue.

Happy Knitting!!