The Lemonade Shop – Yards of Happiness

FO: Liebelle Hat

As my hair has been growing, I’ve been growing it more in an upwards direction…which means hats to fit my hair are getting tricky! I hadn’t really thought about my hair and how my hats might fit or not fit until I started to put some on and thought ‘well that looks horrible,’ so I was a little nervous as I was finishing my Liebelle Hat I cast on last month. This has been a good commuter project while I ride the subway and I wasn’t in any rush but I finished it just in time for some November snow we had and hoping it didn’t look silly when I finally put it on.
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And it fits (also I’m wearing my Pink Professor cardigan, I just took out the collar bind off and made a stretchier bind off for a better fit). Fortunately, the hat has enough height before you start shaping the crown and it accommodates my growing mane.

And here’s my hair contained and then unleashed. LOL I love it being a bit wild.
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I picked this pattern because I’ve knit another by Katrin Schubert and I like her brioche designs. I also know that I do not do gauge swatches for hats (always for sweaters, but never for hats) and after knitting one of her hats before I decided I needed to go down a needle size to a size 3. I also picked this because I could combine a bunch of fun colors and do some striping in the hat. I had a teeny tiny scrap of the sparkly magenta Tempting Ewe yarn from my sister’s sweater I made a while ago. And the light grey is leftover cosmic silver dk from my Dotted Rays shawl (I wear that thing all the time because it’s so big and squishy and warm) and then I pulled out of my stash some limited edition color, Catskills, from the Lemonade Shop yarns. It’s a deep almost olive green with little flecks of rainbow.
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Brioche always keeps me engaged and the end results always make me happy. And because it’s essentially double knit it’s such a warm hat. I was perfectly toasty walking the dogs in the snow. Couldn’t ask for more!

FO: Louisville Knits

I’ve been working on so many little projects and have taken a bunch of random photos so I thought I’d collect a few similar things into one post to share my finished objects. Sound like a plan?

Typically whenever I see my girlfriend Salina I like to take her a crafty gift because we gift handmade things to each other all the time. You might remember the hat I made for her when we went to New Orleans a while ago. Well, I had the same colorway of the Madlinetosh yarn, Spectrum, in the bulky weight that I had waited forever to do something with for her. So I decided to knit her a cowl.
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I picked up the Beginners Brioche Cowl when it was free on Ravelry and used it as a guide to knit Salina a two color brioche cowl in the car on the way to Louisville. It only took me a few hours. I cast on more stitches that required to make it a bit bigger and looser and liked the finished look. I used the blue and purple yarn mixed with a skein of Mighty Stitch Bulky in silver. It was a great contrast and insanely soft. And I also decided her daughter Alexandra needed a cowl too but I wanted to do a bolder color palette and a little something different.
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So I made her the fun Worsted Brioche Bandana Cowl and used the leftover yarn I had from my Happy Little Sweater. I love this Indian Corn colorway from the Lemonade Shop and wanted to put what I had left in a fun project. I contrasted it with some Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Superwash in Columbine Heather, a reddish purple, I had in my stash.
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I think Alexandra will enjoy this little cowl since she’s always cold. It’s cute to wear with her purple coat or just on its own. And while we were in Louisville, Salina took me to Fiber and Friends a cute little yarn shop in La Grange, Kentucky. The ladies in this shop were so warm and inviting. They were taking my coat off for show and tell so they could see my knits! I definitely suggest if you’re in the area to pop on in. And while we were there Salina fell in love with a pom pom so I suggested she pick out some yarn and I would make her a hat to go with it. She picked up this really beautiful Berroco Millefiori BIG yarn in a purple and blue colorway. I knew immediately that one skein would be perfect for the Purl Soho pattern Super Soft Merino Hats for Everyone. It doesn’t take much yarn and I was able to whip it up in about 3 hours.
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I’m so addicted to brioche knitting…you’re going to see these two patterns again very soon. I’ve got some wilder color combos coming that I made for myself!

February 26, 2018February 26, 2018 by IamDWJ Categories: Berroco, blue, Brioche, Color, Cowls & Scarves, FO: Finished Object, Hats, Knit Picks, Knitting, Madelinetosh, multi, purple, Techniques/Stitches, The Lemonade Shop, YarnTags: #yardsofhappiness, brioche knitting, knit cowl, travel knitting, Yarn 10 Comments

FO: Fiona’s Finest

One of my coworkers had her third child last week after having two boys, a baby girl she named Fiona. And if you knew how girly and feminine she was you’d know how exciting it was for her to have a little girl. A few coworkers wanted to send a gift and I decided why not knit up a baby hat that was pink and sparkly? And then I got the even brighter idea to try to add Fiona’s name to her hat! It’s all about practicing my skills, folks.
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So on Friday I opened up my laptop and make a basic chart in Excel to spell out her name.
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And with any basic hat, I pretty much use this chart I’ve had bookmarked forever to get the sizes right if I don’t have a pattern in mind and just build my own. I figure out the yarn I want to use, then my gauge and I get to knitting. For this I cast on 66 stitches and did about an inch of ribbing in the Tempting Ewe, Ewe So Sparkly DK I had leftover from this cardigan and paired it with the Lemonade Shop’s Sparkle DK in Girls Gone Wild (it’s pink with flecks of grey/black) that I had in my stash. I knit a few rows in pink and then started to spell out the name. I repeated it four times around the hat. Thinking about it now I could’ve done a heart in between her name twice but hey, I was just winging it.
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I finished it off the following morning and blocked it and decided to add a button on the inside so I could put a huge pink pompom on the top because why not?! It just looked like it needed a little something extra to add to the sparkly yarn.

And there you have it, a personalized little hat for a newborn baby girl. I hope it fits her during this little cold spell and is just as cute as she is.