What I'm Reading This Month

Decided to finish the year reading a lot of romance, chick-lit, and light reads. It's been a great reading year, and with the influx of 2014 advances I've received, I am so excited for the New Year!

 Takedown Twenty by Janet Evanovich

 A Spring Affair by Milly Johnson

 Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

Heartless (#4 in Parasol Protectorate series)

by Gail Carriger

What are you reading this month?

CGM

 

F.O.: Forest Floor Hat

I finished my Forest Floor hat a few weeks ago, and have been so thankful for its coziness with the cold weather in full force.

This is a pattern from the book Botanical Knits by Alana Dakos. I knit it using Sanguine Gryphon (now Cephalapod Yarns) yarn in the Traveller base, colorway is Monkeymind.

This was a relatively simple hat to knit up, not quite "mindless knitting" as there is a cable pattern in it that varies row-to-row, but definitely doable for an advanced beginner, or if you've never tried knitting cables before.

To make this hat you should be able to knit, purl, k2tog, yo, ssk, M1R, M1L, C4F, C4B, and S2KP2. Don't panic, these stitches aren't as complicated as they sound if you're relatively new to knitting! Before this, I'd never done S2KP2, but found a helpful YouTube tutorial here. These are all stitches, including the C4F and C4B which make the cables, that once you see them done 1-2 times, they're very easy to duplicate.

I did have a spot of trouble when finishing the hat..I'd never worked on double pointed needles before, and the pattern does start out by saying once you start the decreases for the top of the hat, you should switch from a circular needle to double points (dpns). I tried to go as far as I could using my familiar circs, but alas the stitches got waaaay to tight and difficult to knit, so I switched to dpns, again using a handy video tutorial here.  


Again, SO simple once you see it done! I don't even know why dpns made me so nervous to use before this...must be all those needles seeming to "go at once" vs. the usual 2 knitting needles you see most often.

All in all I'm very happy with my new hat, not just because it's keeping my head warm on the bus stop walks in the morning, but for the new techniques I learned along the way. I'm ready to try another pattern from this book soon, I can't say enough good things about Botanical Knits and how wonderful Alana Dakos's patterns are written - very straightforward and easy to read. She also has a wonderful knitting podcast (audio) by the same name as her blog, Never Not Knitting. It's worth it to give her a listen just for the hilarious theme song sung at the end of the show!

CGM