How difficult can it be?

You would think that knitting a colorwork hat would be the hardest part of knitting. It is switching colors and learning how to carry yarn properly. You would think that is tough. 

You would be wrong. The hardest part of knitting a great hat is taking a decent picture of it and yourself wearing it.

It least the good news it that it fits the best of any hat I've knit. Many people said the hat runs big. Old melon head over here thinks otherwise.

Here's to knitting sheep on your hats!

Baa along

So my Baa-ble hat...

It has sheep! I spent part of last week worrying that my sheep floats are too tight. See how the sheep are a bit wrinkly? When you knit color work one strand of yarn is carried behind the other floating along the back of the work, floats. Any floats longer than 4 or 5 stitches are tacked down behind the sheep. If your knitting is too bunched up the floats will be too short and cause the knitting to remain bunched up.

See how the sheep have a bumpy texture? I thought about ripping back and reworking it. Last night I showed it to D and he said the most perfect thing, I like the sheep, they're all puffy! 

You know what? I like how the sheep are puffy too. I'm keeping them.

I always intended to make this a practice hat, why not allow it to have some personality? Perfection is overrated anyways.

Baa Bump

I joined CrazySheepLady and some of her friends in a knitalong (KAL). I've been wanting to knit the Baa-ble hat since Rhinebeck. This KAL was just the final push I needed. I happily cast on and knit almost the full cuff at trivia night. (We lost spectacularly at trivia.) Tonight I settled in for a nice increase round and needle change...

Then I frogged the whole thing when my count did not match what the pattern said I should have. How could this be? I checked the increase round, did I not increase enough? I counted the increases, yep the right number of increases? (No not really but they were spaced correctly.) Finally I counted my ribbing...ah there is the mistake!

How could I not count the cast on correctly? Did I mention this is my first KAL and I am pretty darn excited about it? Oh you figured that out by yourselves? Could one of you not told me to count it again??

We have a saying in the USA, measure twice, cut once. D said that to a coworker a couple of years back. "That's interesting in Russia the saying is measure seven times, cut once." Why was I not Russian while casting on?

So I started over and believe me I counted more than twice, but did I count seven times...