Fo Fury Part 1: The Small Stuff
Here’s the first of four posts on all of the holiday gifts I’ve made over the past month and a half. I’ve been a crazy gift-making machine lately, due to a mix of mall-hating, handmade-wanting, and uncertainty of what to gift to Rob’s family. The contents of the last two posts aren’t finished yet, my fingers are crossed that I’ll have them done in time!
Pattern: Top-down stockinette over 58 stitches with a short row heel and your standard toe (closeup here)
Yarn: Lonesome Stone Mountain Feat in Cran Brulee
Boring old stockinette socks for my mother-in-law. She loved! adored! raved! about the socks I made her last year, so she guaranteed herself a handknit gift this year.
I swatched this yarn with a few different patterns - I wanted something with textural interest, but the yarn was giving me fits:
I’m not buying variegated yarns any more. No, really, I mean it this time.
I bought the yarn during our trip last month in Boulder, at Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins. It’s produced in CO - the perfect souvenir yarn! The yarn was a bit thick-and-thin in nature, and it’s definitely the beefiest yarn I’ve ever knit socks with. I’m pleased with the final result, they’ll keep Rob’s mom’s toes toasty.
SS and S was a great yarn shop, huge and inviting with tons of yarn. I did have one issue with it - I was thisclose to buying some Koigu there, but they were selling it for $14 a skein! It’s usually $12, and the highest I’d previously seen it was $13.50 at Purl. I was priced out of my dear Koigu, so sad.
Pattern: Utopia Hat
Yarn: Malabrigo in Forest
A warm, cozy hat for my brother, who lives in the cold, cold land of Buffalo. I found the pattern via Ravelry - this will become a theme this year. I do wish that the pattern listed the hat’s finished size - I had to do some swatching and ripping and reknitting to get this to work. I knit the Malabrigo very tightly on size 4 or 5 needles, and added two pattern repeats (48 stitches) to the pattern. My brother has a monstrous head, and I’m not entirely sure that this will fit him. It will likely be too short, so I didn’t weave in the top end in anticipation of some holiday frogging.
The yarn was lovely to work with, as always. I have some Manos in the stash, but I think it’s a wee bit scratchy for a gift hat.
Next up: a bevy of scarves.
RSS
I like that hat! I am about to cast on for a cabled hat for a friend of Dave’s and might just have to use that pattern.
I think that makers of sock yarn should label their skeins with the appropriate patterns that the yarn can be used for - like, Good for Cables, or Good for Chevron, etc. It would save us knitters so much time swatching! The socks turned out lovely, though. I think once the holidays calm down I’m going to knit a pair of basic toe-up socks for me.
p.s. Cute kitty!!
Great hat! I like the socks too. Pooloing is a pain but I like it sometimes, only sometimes though!
Both great gifts! The pooling on that yarn is crazy!!!! That is why I swore off variegateds! :) Cute hat - I’m adding it to my Rav queue!
Pooling is most definitely evil. But the socks turned out nice. Cute kitty too!
The Utopia hat is killing me, and I hear you on whole variegated yarn thing, I get sucker punched every time!
I knit the Utopia Hat for my brother-in-law this Christmas, who also lives in Buffalo!
Very nice FO’s. I can’t wait to see more.
Love the Utopia hat - it’s gorgeous in the Malabrigo!
Hooray for finished holiday knits! (I still have 1.25 pairs of socks to complete, yikes.) I’ll be in Boulder next week, so I may have to check out the yarn store…and make unsubtle comments about the price of their Koigu.
Glad to see you finished the Utopia hat! And the Cran Brulee socks turned out well, too–much nicer than the Pool that Ate Brooklyn that you started out with. You’re a FO machine!
I love the socks (I heart variegated yarns knit up in plain stockinette, I really do); but the hat, it is fabulous. So are you done with the holiday craftomania?