Still Life, With Cats

Now that I’ve got two headbands done, I’ve been going through patterns pondering new possibilities, and when I stumbled across this pattern, I knew I absolutely had to make it.

I used some yarn I got in a yarn swap a couple years ago, which turned out to be the perfect fit for this. I actually finished it this weekend, but didn’t block it until today.

This is definitely meant for cold weather, instead of just for keeping one’s hair out of one’s face, since it’s a bit wide for my current needs, but it was a fun, quick project to knit, and it’ll come in handy winter.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.

After I made that first headband, I pondered how to improve things. The first one was nice, but a little loose. So I poked around online until I found an interesting cable pattern, found yet another ball of random acrylic in my stash (let’s just say that I’m in no danger of running out of random acrylic yarn any time soon), and while we binge-watched old episodes of Flea Market Flip, I made myself another headband.

No official pattern to link; I just cast on twelve stitches and followed the instructions for the Sand Cable until it was the length that seemed to fit on my head. Then I kitchenered the two ends together, and poof, headband.

Unlike try #1, this one fits perfectly, so hooray for that. However, the nature of the cable means that it curls in on itself. So while this one fits, and does the job it’s meant to, there’s still some improvements to be made (and oodles of yarn in the stash to try).

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.

This was supposed to be yesterday’s item except I was dithering about what I wanted to make and it turns out, 9:30 at night is not the best time to start a new project when one hopes to finish it before one falls asleep at the needles. So instead I finished it this morning.

After years and years of having super short hair, I’ve decided to try growing it out again. Fine, except that it’s now reached the stage where it’s long enough to hang in my face but not long enough to actually pull back in a barrette, and it’s been driving me crazy. So naturally I decided to knit my way out of this problem, by making myself a headband.

This is the 50’s Knotted Headband. It’s made with some random acrylic yarn from my stash, and except for some minor shaping, it’s basically just a long strip of garter stitch, tied in a knot with some ‘bow’ shaped flaps at the ends.

I wore it all day today to see how I felt. I like it – a lot – except that it is just a hair on the loose side. However, even with that, it worked great for solving the problem of the shag rug on my head, so there will be more headbands in my future, oh yes.

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.

It’s February, which means it’s once again time for Thingadailies, where I commit to making one thing a day for the entire month of February. In years past I’ve had a particular theme in mind, but I really struggled to come up with one for this year, so….my plan is to just make whatever I feel like, and we’ll see how it goes.

Anyway. To start off the month, I am bucking the rules entirely by showing off a thing that is not finished, but on which I’m doing a little bit of work every single day this year. Yes, fellow fiber artists, some friends and I have finally succumbed to the lure of the Temperature Blanket.

The premise of this blanket is that you work one section per day, for an entire year, changing the colors with the temperature of the day (in our case we’re going with whatever the day’s high was). Number of colors used is entirely up to you and how many ends you want to weave in (we’re doing a new color every five degrees), as is the pattern.

I pondered a couple different ideas (since we’re all doing different patterns for this, but using the same set of colors), but in the end decided to make mine entralac, which is a fun technique that makes it look like the finished product is woven, and is also a fantastic way to practice knitting backwards, if that is a skill you ever wanted to learn. I’m doing one panel a day (and have mapped this out completely so as to make sure that this will work). So far I’m keeping up with it, and really liking how it’s turning out (the different blues don’t all come out very well in this picture, unfortunately, but there’s five separate colors represented so far, well six if we count the black).

Making a thing a day for Thingadailies.