stuff on the sticks

so my camera battery charger is still MIA, so i tried taking some pictures of my kniting with my phone. and of course, they pretty much suck. however, in the interest of documentation and the need to talk about yarn, i am showing them to you anyway. bear with me.

i cast on for the foliage hat on sunday while snowed in (by which i mean, not snowed in at all, but rather holed up as though snowed in--you do what you have to here in NC to make winter happen for yourself), and i am through the crown and one and a half repeats of the leaf lace pattern. i am still a little stumbly with lace--just a lot to keep track of--but i made it through the last 8 rounds without having to back up and fix something, so maybe some practice is actually helping. the yarn is malabrigo, in a lovely silvery grey that's almost the exact color of fergus's belly and nearly as soft. love malabrigo. of course, i've lost the label, so god only knows what color this actually is. the hippie's making this hat, too, in green. it says something about us that i get gauge with this yarn on size 7's and he gets it on 9's.

also in the works is a baby bolero for kieran. this pattern is really cute, and it's the only newborn size thing i am knitting--i am 99% sure that we're going to have a 10+ pound baby, in which case, he will be lucky to wear this home from the hospital. i am using the yarn called for, which is blue sky alpacas organic cotton. the color is called willow, i think, but again--the lable is somewhere, so i can't tell you for sure. i can tell you that this yarn is wonderful to knit, and that i love how the ply of green witht he natural ply becomes all tweedy looking when it's knitted up. i am changing the pattern a little bit--i did the shou;der seams with a 3-needle bind-off rather than a seam, and i intend to pick up stitches and knit them from the top down rather than knit them as separate pieces as they are written. everyone i know who has made this has had issues with fitting the sleeves into the arm holes, so this seems a better solution. thanks to knitting betty for the suggestion to do them top down.

i knitted a third umbrella hat because i just wanted the pink yarn. (of course, the color looks all off here due to the lack of proper photography, but i am trying not to whine about that anymore.) i am sure i am not alone in doing that sort of thing. the umbrella hat from leigh radford's one skein book is just a great little satisfying knit. i love the little lace motif at the bottom--it's enough to keep it interesting. and then the stockinette portion of the hat is small enough that it just goes by in a flash. i took no in-progress shots of this project because it was over too soon! i have no idea who will be the recipient of this little hat. it's made to fit a 9-12 month head, so we'll see whose baby turns out to be the right size at the right time. :)

i also took some pictures of the green eyelet baby blanket i am making for kieran, but they came out too atrocious to post. ew. you're just going to have to wait to see that one till i can get the camera battery up and running again. the sam's sending me her extra charger--thank god! soon, i will be back in the game.

i am meeting my new S&B group tonight (if you live in cary or apex, come meet us! we're meeting at 7pm at the starbucks at 55 and high house.), so hopefully i will get the rest of the way through my foliage hat. it's cold! i need that thing!