Knitted Baby Hat

When I was pregnant with Goblin I attempted to knit him a jumper using circular needles. My first attempt was a bit of a disaster. At some point I must have reversed the direction of my knitting which resulted in me knitting a möbius strip. This is something I could never have achieved if I'd actually been trying. After that I retired the circular needles. However one of my friends is expecting her first child and I wanted to make her something special so I thought I'd give the needles another try.

Rather than doing anything sensible like use a pattern I thought I'd just wing it. So I started out on double point needles. Here is a tutorial that I found on how to use double points. Of course using the tutorial would have been far too simple so instead I just guessed how to use them. And I guessed wrong. Instead of realising that you knit to the end and then carry on on to the top of the next needle, for some reason I thought you had to turn each needle round. The result was that the start (the point) of the hat has a cool little spiral effect (again something I discovered by accident). After about five goes round I realised my mistake and started knitting using the double points correctly. I started with about 5 stitches on each of my 5 needles. The yarn I was using is supposed to be for socks and has a pattern imprinted into it which appears as you knit. This is my ideal way of knitting - as little effort as possible for maximum effect.

After I'd knitted what I felt was a suitably long gnomey point to the hat I started to increase. I added a stitch to every stitch I knitted for three rows. At this point I transferred from double point needles to a set of circular needles. That made it easier to see how wide the hat was. The effect of increasing by so many stitches was to increase the hat circumference significantly. Once I'd got it to a wider circumference I carried on knitting until it looked about the right depth. At that point I decreased the stitches to bring the edge of the hat to a circumference suitable for a babies head. I'm afraid this post is a bit useless if you want to follow it as instructions because I basically used judgement rather than counting stitches.
The result was to pull the bottom of the hat in and give it a lovely rippled balloon effect. I think the hat is shaped a bit like a squash. I started casting off when I realised the ball of wool was running out. So the hat is exactly one ball in total.

And here is the end result being modelled on Goblin's particularly ugly plastic doll. I'm sure it will look better on my friend's, bound to be beautiful, baby. 

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Knitted sling

(Goblin is 39 months)

After seeing Small Potatoes beautiful post William's doll I had been meaning to make Goblin a sling for his doll, but then due to nightmares he banished all his toys from his room and stopped playing with them. However, recently Goblin found a bear in a toy shop and started sleeping with it. Then Cerys from Rainy Day Mum let me into the secret that there was a knitting pattern for the Small Potatoes sling at A little time to share, and she kindly interpreted the knitting instructions putting them into idiot terms that even I could understand.

Of course being me I couldn't just simply follow the basic instructions. You see I already had a half done knitting project which happened to be a 50 stitch square. So I used that as the starting point and worked from there - which is why my top picture has the sling template looking rather odd. 

I also decided to try some ribbing. I am useless at ribbing so a nice simple pattern was a great place to practice. This meant my pattern was more like the following:

Knit a 50 by 50 square (thats 8 inch squared). 

Then start decreasing by one stitch at the beginning of the row and one at the end until you get down to 25 stitches. That's when I started ribbing.

And this is where my pattern following goes seriously down hill. I forgot to take a tape measure on holiday. So instead of measuring the 'strap' to make it 14 inches I just measured it by knitting until the 'strap' was as wide as the square front, then folded it back on itself and knitted rib again until it folded back to the beginning of the decrease and then I started increasing again until I got to 50 stitches, then I cast off. 

As you can tell I'm not great at following patterns so I tend to make things up and do a lot by eye and judgement. But the end result seemed to work. I sewed the ends together and gave it to Goblin to put his bear in. The only photo I managed to get was of him trying to take a close up shot of his bear while its in his sling. Needless to say his photo was a bit blurred.

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Candy Cane Reindeer covers

(Goblin is 38 months)

Look what I made, Look what I made! 

I made a little herd of reindeer and you can too - they are scarily easy to make. I've seen ones that involve knitting or crochet and quite frankly I'm not that talented. But these little beauties are made using a knitting nancy (also known as french knitting).

If you have never used a knitting nancy before fear not, I did a post a while ago about how to use one - here.  Each cover took me about 30 minutes and I was being slow and watching TV at the same time, so there is still loads of time to get some of these done before Christmas. (And if you don't have a knitting nancy lying around you can make one using a loo roll with cocktail sticks tapped to the insides to make the posts (two cocktail sticks for each post to provide the gap for your crochet hook).

I realised on the "how to" knitting nancy post I didn't explain how to finish the length so here is a little explanation:
Once you have the length you want you simply cut the yarn with a little tail and thread the tail through the remaining single layer of loops before pulling them off their posts and pulling the tail tight. This closes off the end of the tube. Then use a crochet hook to pull that tail through the tube.

 Eyes and nose can either be stitched on or stuck on. I went for a stitched nose and googley stuck on eyes. You could use a bead or pompoms for a nose and stitched eyes might look more serious but I like my reindeer to be a bit goofy.

Finally the antlers are just bent pipecleaners threaded through the knitting. I didn't have brown ones so I used yellow ones and dyed them with brown food colouring.

And they hang on the tree with no string needed.

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Mummy's hat

(Goblin is 24 Months)

I found some amazing yarn on ebay from the shop Alternative*artisan*UK. It's recycled sari silk yarn -  the colours are totally amazing. I bought the golden colour but it also comes in red, green, turquoise and more. I wasn't sure how it would be to work with so I only bought one 100g skein.  
I didn't really know what to do with it so I just knitted a rectangle on 12mm needles using 30 stitches across. And look what it turned into. 

It feels really nice to wear.