More hats!

This is the Komi hat from Charlene Schurch’s book, Hat’s On - - made with a wonderful one-of-a-kind skein of yarn a good friend spun and dyed, mostly with Kool Aid. I made the three little tassels on top by fingerloop braiding. You can learn more than you would ever want to know about fingerloop braiding at http://www.stringpage.com

I never really got “into” the pattern and found it hard to follow. It got a bit easier when I finally decided to use pattern markers – lovely bejeweled things made by the same friend.

Here are Cyndy’s stitch markers helping out on another hat (I’m on a roll here) and that pattern comes from Nancy Bush’s Folk Knitting in Estonia. The shades-of-blue yarn is some I spun and dyed with food coloring and Kool Aid and is an alpaca/Finnsheep blend. The white yarn in both cases is my handspun Finnsheep.

In the background is the Kiri shawl. There are lots of mistakes in it, but the most obvious is at the beginning where I have a row of garter stitch where it shouldn’t be. The other thing I shouldn’t have done was to have spun the wool in the grease. I had a lovely clean Finn lamb’s fleece and thought spinning in the grease would make it easier for me to spin it very thin, but the higher amount of twist made it harder to remove the lanolin and dirt from the finished yarn. Also learned along the way that when you knit a lace project with a thicker yarn, it is called Moose Lace.