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 turns out, when you’re working on trying to finish 6 things at once, nothing really gets done. So here are a couple of projects that have been in the works for a while, but haven’t seen any blog time.

This is the start of a second Sock for Veronik, from the Interweave Knits Holiday issue. I received the first sock from Erin in a swap last fall, and I’m finally getting around to knitting the other one now. This is a photo from last week - I’ve turned the heel and I’m at the final foot stretch right now. The yarn is Lorna’s Laces in the Firefly colorway.

This is my first fully continentally-knit project. I’ve been meaning to switch to continental knitting because of it’s speed for a while now, but this swap has given me the motivation to finally do so. Erin knit the sock on size 1 needles, and my english-knitting gauge would have been way too tight for that needle size. Since my continental knitting is looser, I figured that I could get away with the size 1’s without swatching. So far, that’s working well.

I’m actually knitting this sock combined, which means that the purls are wrapped the opposite way. This is a much more (to me) fluid movement than normal continental purling, and it supposedly improves your tension. However, the combined knitting is causing me to have the most awful knitting tension, ever. I never had issues with rowing-out when I knit english-style, but the difference between my knit and purl rows were glaringly obvious when I worked the stockinette heel of this sock. It turns out that my combined purling technique brings forward so little yarn that the loops are much tighter than my continental knit stitches. I have to purl extremely loosely, while knitting very tightly, to get even tension. It’s actually pretty difficult for me to remember to purl that loosely when knitting mindless stockinette.

So! The plan is to do some major swatching with regular old continental purling and see how that works out.

This was supposed to be a Christmas gift for Rob’s dad. Cancelling our trip gave me such a relief for this one - there was no way that it would have been done in time. Rob’s family has a house in a rural area, and everyone dons hunter’s orange when the hunters are a hunting. I’ve been meaning to knit Rob’s dad an orange, reindeer hat for a couple of years, and the second I saw Norah Gaughan’s Intricate Stag Bag pattern, I knew I wanted to hat-ify it.

I was on the prowl for the perfect searing orange yarn, and Jet pointed out the perfect skein when she was in town in October. Literally - we were in a yarn store and I was telling her about my plight for the perfect yarn, and she pointed out the perfect skein! The orange is Cherry Tree Hill Supersock in Tangerine, and the grey is Dale of Norway Baby Ull. I’m knitting this on US 2 needles, and the hat is two pattern repeats of the 92 stitch pattern. I fiddled with the chart to make it fit my gauge by moving the trees away from the deer by a few stitches and adding a third tree.

The hat looks pretty much the same right now. I finished knitting the crown, but frogged it all back to this point. My floats were very large in the crown, above the deer’s horns and top of the middle tree. I’m not weaving the black behind the orange because it’s a bit thicker and it shows, and the black stitches were extremely loose. I might duplicate stitch the tops of the two taller trees. Is that totally cheating? Will I be kicked out of the Fair Isle club?