From One Hat to Another

I finished a project! Late Sunday night I completed the baby hat for my friend's 17-month-old. I made them matching hats out of the Berry Baby Hat pattern and used black and white, flipping the colors so mom has the white with black top, and baby has the black with white top. I hope I can get it in the mail tomorrow. They've already had a bit of snow there!

Very late Sunday night I started a new project, the Cabled Chapeau, a pattern from Stitch Nation which is free on their site and on Coats and Clark. Last year I made a hat I loved but it doesn't look good on me. I would also need to frog it a bit and make the crown a lot deeper to get the fit I'm after, namely, to cover my bloody ears!


I'm using Plymouth Encore Worsted Tweed for this project. It's a wool/acrylic/viscose blend that is springy and soft. I noticed when casting on that this yarn is a 'Z' twist. I hope that doesn't cause too much of a problem for me. The only other time I knit with a 'Z' twist was for a baby kimono sweater in 2009. The Lion Brand Microspun has a tight 'Z' twist which gave the knitted fabric a different texture. This yarn seems to knit up fast and is very cushy and lovely so I hope that will offset the irritation of cables. They are lovely after all, so I must put up with them.

Tonight when I picked up the hat to work on it, I noticed a weird stitch. Well, not so much a stitch a mistake. There is a loop of yarn pulled from one row up over 5 rows and knitting back in. I don't know how this happened, but I will be ripping back a bit tonight to take care of it.

Also, does anyone have tips on how to knit cables? I end up with some loose stitches on one side of my cables, and I think there's a trick to preventing that, twisting the stitch, or knitting through the back? Something like that.

Winter Birds

I'm sitting at my desk at work and I can see five robins and a blue jay skittering around on the brick steps, looking for a meal of bugs from in between the cracks of the stone wall. Here is the view from my office. My work is in the lower level of a house, sunken basement, so I see the steps, garden and driveway. There is so much activity outside this window! I know it's hard to see in the picture, but there are 3 robins on the stairs. Maybe it shows up better if you click on the picture. Today is the first day I've seen these birds. The winter here has been so cold even the squirrels have been in hiding.