September, 2011 | Mama Loves Knitting

I have another special special person in my life that was the recipient of a knit birthday hat, and don’t you worry I stuck to that ‘oh so familiar ribbed pattern’ that I so do love. I couldn’t ever tell you the exactness of it, I pretty much wing it every time, but I find myself looking back on this here blog to remember how many stitches to cast on. This time for a 4 year old I cast on 60 stitches. The requirement is that the number of stitches be a multiple of 4 for the pattern to work. I’ve finally come to this conclusion after a year 1/2 of knitting pretty much the same hat 25 times.

I decided tiny Beeser needed a pom pom atop the knit goodness. This is the perfect way to use up the last little bit of your skein of yarn. Sometimes these particular hats are hard for me to give away, but it is usually just because of the yarn I use and how cozy it is. I just want to wear it, I probably ought to make one for myself. Edie chose this yarn out of my stash a year ago, and it is right at the very top of my list. I heart it! I could make this hat a billion times and never get tired of making it, especially with a good movie in my face, or this time – an airplane ride to New Orleans from Montana. I finished it up by the time we arrived, with the exception of the finishing work because I didn’t have a needle or a crochet hook to hide my ends.

I used Sheep Shop Yarn (100% wool) which I need to stock up on because I LOVE it. Another thing I was without was a pair of scissors. Anyone have tips for that on the plane? Here is what I did, and do fairly frequently…

I just fray the yarn until I can snap it off. It doesn’t make for very pretty pieces hanging off but it gets the job done. You hide those pieces anyway…so what difference does it make. My husband suggested on our last flight that I use the seatbelt – he’s so smart.

One thing that did surprise me about knitting on a plane is you can bring whatever knitting needles you want to – no problem. I was surprised when I brought my gigantic size 13 metal needles, no probs. Just in case I tend to bring the whole lot of them. Thanks to my sister I have a handy place to keep them all and roll them up for transport.

Here is one more sweet photo of Edie that I took only a couple of weeks ago – she is my littlest son’s bestest friend. Two peas they are.

Her Mama promised me photos of her wearing her new hat so just as soon as I get my mitts on those I will put them up on our facebook page.

I’ve been away from you, but definitely not away from my knitting. I’ve got a handful of projects for new babes coming into the world and for sweet babes already in the world. I have my sweater in a good place, just awaiting the assistance of the Knitting Jedi to finish up the hood. She is this woman that is probably in her 60s and she’s been knitting since she was 3 years old. I’m pretty sure she might know every single thing there is to know about knitting. My sweater has sleeves now though…I could conceivably wear it without the hood…but I kind of had my heart set on a hood.

Soon soon – the air is chilling – it is harder and harder to get out of my nice warm bed every morning. Pretty soon I’ll be all snuggled up in a nice warm sweater of my own creation.

I had a fun and very full summer. Each of the places I visit, in addition to checking out the local toy store, I’ve now found I need to find the local yarn shop. I made it back to the midwest for a visit and my sister and I had a couple of days sans our kiddos while Grandma and Grandpa spent some quality time with them. We found a couple of magical yarn shops that I hadn’t ever been to.

The first was Crafty Planet in Minneapolis. We decided since we had time we’d find the yarn I would use to make her baby a blanket and hat. Both will be featured in future posts. The blanket yarns are upon her shrinking lap (courtesy of Spud & Chloe). They had several yarns to choose from so it was pretty fun to look without distractions, they also had some pretty great fabric so we spent a LOT of time at Crafty Planet.

Then we got hungry and there was a tiny little restaurant that happened to be right around the corner. We actually did a GPS search for restaurants (pulled over on the side of the street) and we decided on our destination and we were about 20 feet from the parking lot. Probably didn’t really need the GPS to help us get there, actually, who am I kidding?, we did. This was my delicious lunch at Chimborazo.

Now back to the yarn. The next stop was pretty much my dream come true. The only bad part about this entire place was the temperature and that was simply because it was 100+ degrees outside in the muggy muggy midwest. Borealis was the shop we sought out in St. Paul, MN. This was outside the front door and I think it ought to be their home page photo…just sayin’.

I’m pretty into the idea of tagging things these days. My tags will unfortunately never be this awesome.

Now for the yummy inside of the store. I will mention this place is HUGE, it has 3 separate yarn rooms – an entire room for just sock yarn. If sock yarn is your ‘thing’ you will probably want to put it on your list of places to visit before you run out of yarn. Which poses the question does any knitter/crocheter ever run out of yarn? I recently told Jan that I hope I live long enough to use up all of my fabric and my yarn. She told me I would just buy more, so that was probably impossible.