Still kicking, honest!

Hey y'all. Sorry it's been so long since my last post. I actually discovered one "locked and loaded" as it were from Feb 14th, which I apparently wrote in its entirety and then decided to hang onto for a day to make sure it was all cool, and well... didn't look at it again until, well, five minutes ago.

I'll get it up here in a second.

Mostly things have been kinda rough, I'm sorry to say. There's a big elephant in my living room right now, and so long as there's a chance it will leave of its own accord, I'm loathe to give it incentive to stick around by talking about it overmuch.

But, y'know. Elephant. In the living room. Kinda makes it hard to really wrap my head around anything else I might decide to blog about. Hence the no-blogging for so long.

I'm afraid I don't have photos as yet - I've got a couple of FOs hanging around, but I'm wanting to get them washed and blocked and extra-purty before I blog 'em up, y'know? But there has been knitting going on around here - some socks, a scarf, lots of swatching, and a hat which caused me a surprising amount of difficulty.

See, I was knitting up a nice hat for my dad's birthday, and didn't want to bother with a swatch (feh! it's a hat! who needs swatches for a hat? yeah, that'd be me. anyway). So I made a nice deep ribbed brim, and then decided to switch to stockinette for the crown of the hat. Which is when I discovered I had cast on way too many stitches and the switch to stockinette was resulting in a great woollen bucket.

So I frogged back to the ribbing and decided, "That's okay! It'll just be a ribbed hat. That'll be fine!" I was a little consternated about how to manage the decreases, but recalled a nice ribbed hat pattern in Hip to Knit which I would consult to see how they managed the decreases on that - it seemed nice in the photo, after all. Unfortunately, when I did manage to consult HtK, I discovered that the directions for working the decreases went roughly like this, "Work decreases using either k2tog or p2tog as necessary to maintain stitch pattern."

As you might imagine, this wasn't so helpful.

So I soldiered on and did the best I could, and managed to create, by the time I finished, a great gray nipple hat. Which I let sit on a shelf for a week or so until I could snag a bit of time to blog and fix it, which occurred two nights ago. Except that I completely forgot to take a picture of the great gray nipple until I was sitting in my knittin' chair with a wodge of yarn in my lap, getting ready to put it back on the needles. sigh! Clearly, my Blogging Instincts are not yet fully honed.

Having been failed by HtK, I decided instead to consult Ann Budd, and her lovely Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns. After a bit of poking around, I decided on a concentric circles decrease pattern, and established a couple of "rules" for myself regarding "maintaining the pattern" (which, of course, I promptly broke six rows later). Anyway, it turned out mostly all right, though a bit strange in the Maintaining The Stitch Pattern department. At least it's no longer nipular, which I'm glad of.

I'll take pictures and get them up soon, because the crown of this hat... it really must be shared. It doesn't look bad, per se, but it's just so odd. Not at all what I was expecting. Not at all.