Winter is Here!

Unbelievable.  Last Tuesday was 16°C.  The next day, the temperature fell over 10 degrees and stayed there.  The snow started coming in on Saturday.  Now people are scrambling to get their winter tires on.  I was afraid we would get an early winter this year; I guess I knew it was coming because we had a few flakes of snow on Halloween.  Knitting warm woolies started earlier this year for that and one other reason.

My son had his first trip with the school for 3 days away from home to Camp Muskoka (http://www.campmuskoka.com/) in the first week of November.  He had a great time.  Being north of Toronto, they already had snow up there.  In preparation for that trip, I made him a very simple hat and cowl.  He requested no patterning, just his favourite colour, blue, and the cowl had to have buttons. I used Bernat's Glow-In-The-Dark yarn again.  Simple is good; it gets done quickly.  I know he doesn't look it in this picture, but he was actually quite happy with it.  Now his sister wants the same hat in purple.  Happy knitting!

Ski Toque Available on Ravelry

I just published another pattern on Ravelry yesterday.  It's a very fitted Ski Toque.  I knit the entrelac band flat and then joined it to work the crown in the round.  Please check it out.  I hope you all like it.

You can find it at:  

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/ski-toque

The Dragon Returneth

I caved and went yarn shopping for my son’s dragon hat and scarf. The yarn in my stash was either not the right colour or texture. At least I convinced him that his hat scarf should match his hat. My initial thought was to go for a lovely merino. I started phoning around to see what stores were carrying. On store was very helpful and suggested that maybe I would like to use an acrylic or acrylic blend because it was for a child and acrylic wouldn’t shrink in the wash. I knew then this was the store I had to go to; Main St. Yarns. I lucked out in that Friday night, they were participating in a special event with some other downtown Milton stores. They were open from 7-11 pm with specials on. I didn’t know how special till I got there; everything was 50% off. I was going to stick to my budget as I always do but my lovely husband convinced me that at 50%, I had to take advantage of the sale. Okay, so I exceeded my budget but under the sale circumstances, can I be blamed? I picked up some lovely yarn to do a stole from Louisa Harding’s Hummingbirds called Kohl Mexicana.

During the week, I was developing a balaclava pattern to use for my son’s dragon hat. I figured, it’s really not that much different from a sock. I did a small scale version with some yarn I had at home and was quite pleased with what I had come up with. The decreases I ended up working are different from what I would use for a sock but effective.














I then had to find a small doll to try this on. And thus it was that my daughter’s Princess Dora became Ninja Dora.



















Here’s a bit of swatching I was doing as practice for the scarf. The yarn I’m using is from S.R. Kertzer and is called Northern. The mitred square is for dragon scales adn the in the round is for the balaclava.