Shopping!

I went yarn shopping. No, I'm still poor, but I budged a bit of money up to buy a present for my secret pal. No, I haven't mailed it yet. So far I've got at least a week's gap between buying and shipping my SP gifts....

What I ended up with (besides the present, which I'm not showing for obvious reasons) was a skein of Filatura Di Crosa 127 Print, in the Lavender Colorway. Lovely stuff, soft to the hand, and knits (when you knit loose and on #8 needles) into a wonderful, drapy fabric. The yarn has 27 feet of solid color, then 8 feet of variegated inter spaced with the main color. So you get 'stripes', depending on where you start it, and how wide your piece is.

So I pulled out the center, and decided not to start with the colored bit. I wound off until I got to a solid section, and broke the yarn. I cast on 56 stitches for a normal hat, and knitted away.

Joy. I really enjoyed knitting with this. So I knit for about 3 hours, while we make characters for a new RPG (shut up. I like gaming.) and then when I got home and watched Return of the King on our new (to us) bigger screen TV. I got tired, and decided the hat was big enough. Decreased and bound off, with about 20% of the yarn to go.

Then I realized the hat was a bit short. Not too bad, and it was fine if I unrolled the rolled hem. Hmmm. I went to bed in a sorta snit; nothing I've done lately has come out perfectly. The stripey purse: strap too wide. The cabled hat: looks a bit... wonky, like it needs blocking, but I did it in acrylic. Can you block acrylic? Off to google that... The monster thing I made (more on that later) came out almost featureless, though a bit cute. And then the purple hat.

I had a mini breakdown (this is what I call any showing of negative emotions. My mate calls it the "Patented Lindsey Robbins Litany of Woe." Bastard.) and was advised that if my crafting wasn't relaxing me like it was supposed to, maybe I should put it aside.

The horror. Put it aside? Is he insane? It's keeping me going. Ok, maybe not, but still... I love my crafting.

I woke up yesterday determined to 'save' the purple hat. So I picked up the stitches on the cast on hem, and knit three rows of "knit front and back of each stitch." Yeah, I ruffled the everloving hell out of that thing.

And then, when I was casting off, I ran out of yarn. So I picked up the colored 8 feet I broke off from the beginning... and that helped for about 3 inches of hat. This thing has like 450 stitches now that it's ruffled... Hmmm. I used every bit of yarn I had broken off, cut off, or used in other spaces. I snipped the long end from the cast on off and used that. I still fell short.

So I used my crochet hook to pull each loop through the one previous, and then lifted the new loop over the old. It worked, and it the hellaruffle you can't tell. I wove in the 15 (yes, 15) ends from all the yarn scrounging, and have a hat. Now, I have a total of about a foot of yarn left over from the ball, in 2 inch pieces. I pop the hat on my head and really love it.

I show it to the mate, and he says ".... You put a ruffle on it."

"Yes." Flounce of the head to show off the ruffle.

"A ruffle."

"Yes...."

"A ruffle?"

"What's wrong with a ruffle?"

"... Nothing, honey. It's cute."

"What do you mean by that??"

"I mean it's cute. Yes. Cute." He even patted me on the head.

... I like my ruffled hat. And anyway, it's for the sale...

In completely unrelated news; I know what I did on the shorts, and I didn't do anything wrong, except hold them upside down when the teacher came to look at them. That's why she thought I had done something wrong. So it's back to class tonight to re-resew my shorts. Arg.

Oh, and I'm working on getting my serger working. Took it out of the box and fiddled with it, made sure it was threaded right (no, I didn't unthread it. I'm not insane!), but it's not surging. It's just wrapping the 'tongue' in thread. So it's at the shop, waiting for a free estimate to fix it. I so want to make a shirt before the Ventura Highland Games .... We'll see if it gets out of the shop on time.

Off to rememebr how to block acrylic. How can I block a hat without a hatblock.... Hmmm....