This blog has been brought to you by the letter C

C being Christmas, of course. I mean it is November and all.



I finished the Muppet Pelt on Sunday morning. As I mentioned before, the pelt is for my mother (although it seems to be quite popular). So here are the stats:


Pattern: This little baby is 16 stitches wide, all knits. So - garter stitch. Why there must be a specific name for just knit stitches, I do not know.

Yarn: One strand Red Heart Pale Plum, one strand Lion Brand Fun Fur in Confetti. I used maybe 1/8 (this is a complete guess here) the skein of Red Heart and 2.5 skeins of Fun Fur.

Needles: Size 15 (10mm) Clover bamboo straights. They could totally kill vampires.

---

So even though I have about a million half-finished projects, and even though I really, really didn't need to, I convinced myself last night that there is no time like the present to teach oneself how to do cables. I entirely blame some blog I was reading yesterday that linked to a no-cable-needle-cabling tutorial (by the way, in retrospect, the technique makes perfect sense). I ditched the cable needle immediately and used a spare double-point instead, which isn't really avoiding the spare needle. But I digress. I started looking for an easy cable pattern, but none of the cabled hats or scarves in my books looked simple enough. (Note: I seem to be intimidated by a difficulty rating of "Expert". "Advanced" has no affect on me.) Finally I found knitty's Coronet, which I promptly started. Started.... by learning a provisional cast-on. Oooooh. Then I figured out the cables. This cable pattern gives the appearance of being braded, and in the 8-row repeat the cables cross only twice. The rest of it are just normal old stitches. Maybe to you seasoned knitters this is just par for the course, but to me it is magic. They cross twice.. but it braids! How can this NOT be magic??

So I'm trying to justify Coronet by thinking about who might get it for Christmas. Who wears brown? I have some light kind of off-white and a "natural" color all in the same wool that are going to be part of the top, since I don't think I have enough of any one of them for the whole hat. Oh and there's the fact that this is 100% wool and wool is precious and I love it. So this can't just go to anyone. And knitting with my precious wool might have made me a little wool-crazy. Not that that's a bad thing. But I don't want to go back to the stash that has so much Red Heart I want to scream.




Yes, this stash. Paint used to protect the extremely guilty. And there are something like 3 baskets of yarn sitting around looking decorative. I NEVER said I didn't have a problem, people. What I need is more arms.