The Knitting Crazies

I've been knitting more lately. As a matter of fact, I might have gone a bit knitting crazy.

First there was the hat Iggy chewed on, just because I wanted to knit something. Except the pattern, while deceptively simple, was frustrating. I had it memorised witin minutes, but it still was very unforgiving towards mistakes. One stitch missing, one too much, and it broke down completely.

So I asked I. if her granddaughter needed a hat for autumn, got a yes, and made a fish hat that's even louder than the one I have. Mine is blue, green and neon orange. I.'s granddaughter, should she choose to wear it, will be rocking fluorescent pink, sunny yellow and neon orange. I showed it to I's daughter, who looked a bit intimidated. Then again, I'd be intimidated if someone asked if they could put an eyeless fish on my daughter's head. On the other hand, Boyfriend wants a fish hat for his birthday, please. In my trademark screaming color scheme.We must be terribly in love.

I couldn't find the right buttons, though. I found the perfect ones way, way back in Brussels, so I knew that somewhere out there, stores could theoretically stock 38 mm, white clown suit buttons. I just couldn't find any. I combed through the German Amazon. Zipp. The British Amazon, however, had exactly my buttons. For a higher price and eight pounds sterling in shipping, no matter how many I bought. Some quick calculations showed I could get them cheaper than even the prices in Brussels if I bougt what can be kindly described as 'a few more'. My shipment of fifty fish-hat-eye buttons should be arriving around Thursday. Buttony perfection.

During the fish hat and normal hat time, Sis teased me mercilessly. I mostly wear silly hats I've knit myself. Some people smoke, I appear in public with a stocking cap with over a dozen 3D eyeballs on it. My quirk is less harmful to others. I've got a fish hat, and a normal knitted hat on which I've grafted two little knitted horns. I've got my merino leftover hat, which is stripy, with tasseled ties and has a color scheme best described as 'ecclectic'. So I get some people who are amused, out loud, at what's on my head.

Except Sis' birthday was coming up (it was last Thursday) and she'd dropped the words 'owl hat'. The owl thing is a bit of a running gag. She'd like some owl plugs she couldn't find anywhere in her size, which I just stumbled across available in pretty much every size, then she got a ring, and her birthday card had cute little cartoony owls on it. Her gift was a gift certificate, which I thought was boring. It needed some original wrapping.

So I knitted a purple-with-bright-green hat with a cute, if slightly large owl worked in in stranded colorwork. Chances of her wearing it are small, since she likes having big hair and works from home, but she got a kick out of it. J. stole it for a moment, tried it on and loved it.

I've learned a long time ago to knit whimsical hats out of cheap yarn, in case the whimsy wore off. Then I learned that, if the whimsy doesn't wear off and the yarn is too cheap, and thus too low quality, it causes sadness, because the hat frizzles up, gets little clumps of worn off yarn material and gets all ugly. It took me not very long to find a compromise. If anyone else is struggling with the same problem, go for a good-quality acrylic from a good company. I use Bravo from Schachenmayr. It comes in a myriad of colors, has multi-colored, self-striping and even thicker varieties available, and it will stand up to a few washings. It's not the cheapest of cheap yarns, but it's definitely below 'reasonably priced' on the yarn cost totem pole.

Also, and I know this makes me sound stingy, some people are genuinely happy with an easy-to-maintain hat in bright colors and a slightly whacky pattern. I actually knit a few people things for under five euros, gifted them due to no time to go shopping, and gotten happier responses than people who shelled out fifteen or twenty euros. I've had people pay me to knit them things out of cheap yarn, admitting I only wanted the yarn cost, which was usually about two or three euros. Some of them paid five. One person, who got two children's hats, paid fifteen. (Small disclaimer: I didn't accept the extra money if I was using a pattern someone else released. The fifteen euros were way too much in my opinion, for a pattern I'd doctored out myself, but they were wired to me under the guise of I-insist-on-delivering-you-your-€-3.40-but-never-get-to-see-you and didn't know how to wire money over my eBanking at the time)

Also, remember the pizza episode? Yeah, I got annoyed with our pot holders. I've been annoyed with them for a long while, but the discovery of easy to make homemade pizza sealed the deal. I wanted an oven mitt. A thick, nice oven mitt. A big one, that protected me further than my wrist. I wanted one this weekend. So I took the yarn I won (I've still got some left), which, as mentioned before, is 100% wool, which doesn't melt the way acrylic will. Also, it's feltable. Felting seals up all those nasty little holes thick knits tend to have, and which are safety hazards on oven mitts. But there were several patterns to choose from. I went for the big, manly oven mitt, knitted in less than three hours, threw it in a washing bag and tossed it in with the laundry.

Have I mentioned how much I love my new washing machine? The mitt felted beautifully in two cycles, one of which was at a relatively low temperature. I know the friction from the other washing helped the felting process, but I'm still happy.

And the mitt works. We tried it out before it was completely dry (important safety tip: wait until all felted oven mitts are completely dry before bringing near heat, as the water will get hot and hurty within 30 seconds), and it worked, provided we didn't hold the baking tray for too long. I'm pretty sure it's fine now. And, unlike pot holders, it protects the entire hand from all of the oven, not just the palm of the hand from what you're trying to move.

Now all I have to do is knit Boyfriend's birthday gift while he's not looking. And I think J. and W. are getting hats for Christmas from me, too. Merino hats, in at least partly sensible designs. Because I realise some gifts need some investment other than just time and love and laughter.