Pattern: The charts are a modified version of the Intricate Stag Bag, the general size is sort of based on the We Call Them Pirates hat.
Yarn: Cherry Tree Hill Supersock in Tangerine, Dale of Norway Baby Ull in a charcoal grey

Every Thanksgiving, we visit Rob’s parents in a rural area of Pennsylvania. That’s right before hunting season begins, so we usually don hunter’s orange if we walk around outdoors. I’ve been wanting to make Rob’s dad a stranded hat with a deer motif for years, and when I saw the Intricate Stag Hat pattern, I was sold!

Rob’s parents were in town a couple of weeks ago, so the hat was quickly finished and gifted. It’s a bit large on Rob’s head, but it fits his dad’s 24" melon perfectly.

I modified the chart a bit by moving the trees away from the deer by a few stitches, creating some treetops, and adding a third tree. The pattern repeats on the back of the hat.

I used fingering weight yarns so that I could cram the whole scene onto the hat. I’ve used Dale of Norway Baby Ull before, and I’d use it again in a heartbeat, it’s soft like buttah. This was my first time using Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn - it’s quite tightly plied, but it blocked into a beautifully cohesive fabric.

The biggest challenge with this hat was tensioning the very long floats in the chart. The floats were extremely long at the very top of the hat, so I stopped the stranded knitting and duplicate stitched the top of the trees. I’ve never been much of a duplicate stitch fan, but it’s fairly invisible. It’s difficult for me to tell visually where the stranded knitting ends and the duplicate stitch begins, although the texture of the fabric changes at the duplicate stitch area.

A lining knit with the Baby Ull finished off the hat. Knitting the lining was the same amount of knitting as a sock, what a slog. I’ve offered Rob’s dad a liner replacement if the hat isn’t warm enough - it seemed fine when I was knitting it, but the hat is pretty thin. Overall, I’m happy with the hat, but I’m not yearning to struggle with any super long floats in the near future!

It pleases me. I’ve been following around the poor kittehs all weekend, and they are clearly tired of the camera already.

I realized that I’ve got a number of photos uploaded to flickr that I never blogged about. I’ve got a big finished project that I’m too tired to coherently post about right now, so here’s some sewing miscellany to tide you over.

I finally stitched the diamonds together, and boy, that was No Fun. The paper mockup was helpful, but I still had difficulties lining up the rows of diamonds. There’s a couple of corners where you can see a jog but hopefully it won’t be too noticeable! I’m thinking that a 1/8" shift isn’t terribly glaring. If I were to sew these again, I’d mark some darts along the diamond edges to help with lining them up. Small cutting errors really throw the alignment off in this project.

The diamond strip is destined for a pillow. The front will just be this panel and some linen, and the back will be patterned with a hidden zipper down the center. I’m also planning on sewing piping around the edge in a contrast fabric.

I’m still trying to decide what pillow #2 will be. I was originally going to simplify the diamond idea by cutting longer parallelograms (so a diagonal stripe of diamonds would be one piece), but then I saw this:

The small clipping is a pillow from a recentish Domino magazine. Rather than using striped fabric, I thought it would be a great idea to piece the stripes together myself with all the leftover linen and blue+orange fabrics. The jury’s still out on this one because it does look like a ton of work. Although it will undoubtedly be easier to figure out than the diamonds!

February’s socks are finished! I swear I finished them last month, but have put off posting until I retook the photo. They kind of blend in with the background, no? I suppose I can be stealth kelp in these, at least on my back porch.

Pattern: Child’s First Sock in Shell Pattern, from Knitting Vintage Socks
Yarn: Yarn Botanika Merino/Tencel in colorway Rum Runner

I heart the look of this pattern! Naturally, I made some modifications:

• I changed the top rib to 2×2. I prefer my rib to consistently match (or not match) with the sock patterning, and the 2×1 rib didn’t sync with the pattern repeat.
• I flipped the chart for the second sock.
• I’ve read that the gusset depth is pretty shallow for this pattern, so I extended it to 16 slipped stitches.

The only issue I have with these socks is the yarn dye job. I really wanted a semisolid yarn, but I opened up the skein to find this:

The yarn was tied too tightly before it was dyed and the dye barely penetrated in that spot. There were lots of white flecks in about 75% the skein. The left sock leg was knit with the semisolid portion, and the patterning in the rest of the socks is obscured by all that white. Boo, but I like them anyway!