Slowing Down for NaNoWriMo

Knitting is decidedly a time consuming hobby.  The most frustrating part of it seems to be winding balls of yarn when you don't have a ball winder or swift.  This latest cake of yarn happens to be my most sloppy, but all considered, it's still pretty darn good for being done by hand!

I'll be honest, I have no idea how to properly ball yarn.  I don't know how this cake thing developed, but once I started doing it I realized how easy and practical it was.  I've always liked working with cakes of yarn better.  The one thing I haven't been able to manage is center pull.  Then again, center pull balls and cakes tend to collapse in on themselves once you get towards the end and then you just need to redo them anyway, especially if you don't use up every bit of it.  Now I just need to find a way to keep the yarn from wanting to bounce around everywhere.  Right now it's not so bad because the yarn stays tucked in the center of my crossed legs, but it would be more practical if I had one of those jars or whatever that you can put the yarn in to keep it from bouncing around everywhere.

As for the hat, it's coming along fairly well.  I'm still not done, which is putting me at a third of the rate I've had for the other two hats.  Something about NaNoWriMo makes it tough to get much work done.  Thankfully, I don't have a deadline to get this done for, so I can go at whatever pace I want to.  Besides, something about knowing it's going to come together so quickly really helps me feel good about it.  I don't feel like I'm taking forever to make it.

As for the yarn, I'm really loving the color.  After seeing the pink one I started to worry that it would have weird pooling, but it really doesn't.  The colors are falling a lot more like the purple one, which I really like.  I have to admit, I'd thought about keeping the purple one for myself, but now that I see the gray, I'm pretty happy with it.  It's very wearable and it will go with all of my jackets.  That means this can be my go-to hat for winter this year.  I'm glad to finally have something that's a little more neutral.  Usually I go for colors, which don't always work with everything.  Even earth tones can be hard if everything else I'm accessorizing with has color.

Hopefully it won't be too much longer before this one's done.  It's not working up horribly badly, and being so far ahead in my novel, I feel like I've got a little wiggle room to do other things for a while.  The pattern is so intuitive by now that I'm learning to work on it without looking.  I've always felt like if I knit without looking at my work I would screw something up, but it feels so natural in my hands, at least until the knit together and yarn over rounds.  It helps to have something I can't take my eyes off of.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was perfect for that.  It was also insanely funny, so I'm glad I recorded it.

Now that Daylight Savings is over, it gets dark so early.  That early darkness has me wanting to curl up with some tea and do something crafty, when I'm not writing, of course.  I can imagine as Christmas looms nearer I'll be looking for Christmas movies to watch while I knit, perhaps with some hot chocolate.  I'm hoping the weather change will have a lot more projects flying off my needles.  For now I'll just be happy to get finished with this hat!

And Now One For Mom

Yeah, I'm still on the kick.  I'm knitting up yet another Slouched Tuva Hat.  This one is for my mom, which I'm really loving the way it's turning out.  The colors play in a much different way than they did on the pink one.  I really like it much better.  If it weren't for the fact that I think my mom would like this one better than the gray, I'd keep this one!  Who knows, I may still decide to yet.

Since I've got the picture there, I have to point out that cake of yarn.  Isn't it lovely?  One might even say it's very proper looking.  It almost looks like it, say, came off a yarn baller.  Well, it didn't.  I actually caked that yarn by hand.  Can you believe it?  By hand!  I can't make a ball of yarn to save my life, but since I've learned how to make it look like a cake of yarn, I've never stopped doing it this way.  It looks awesome and it's so incredibly practical.  The only down side is it doesn't work so well as a center pull, but I haven't been using center pull balls anyway.  The ball of yarn falls apart too much when you get to that outside edge, meaning I have to redo the end of the ball anyway.  This may result in more yarn bouncing around, but at least I know the yarn will be in a nice, solid little ball when I'm done and I can stow away the leftover stuff for later.

One would think I'd be sick of these hats by now, but I'm really not.  I love the way the yarn is coming together differently for each hat.  You can see in this picture the way the yarn almost stripes on the pink hat, but it doesn't really do that at all on the purple one.  If I had to take bets, I'm guessing the gray one is going to be similar to the pink one.  We'll see how they turn out.

Seeing the two of these hats together makes me feel really accomplished.  This feels like the most knitting I've done in a long time, even if it is just because each project is smaller and therefore done quicker.  It may be less stitches than a pair of socks, but it feels like I've gotten so much more done.  It's more of a feeling of instant gratification.  Undoubtedly I'll be on to the third hat, or at least balling up the yarn, by tonight, if not tomorrow morning at the latest.  There's something instant gratification about it that really has me inspired to keep on knitting.  Now I just need to find the yarn to make a whole stack of these hats up so all the kids can have one!