It's Saturday Already??

This week has absolutely flown by! I wanted to blog mid-week, but time and opportunity escaped me. Besides, I've been busy knitting!

The Selbu Modern hat is finished, blocked and has been worn. This was a fun project. The top, final decreasing was a little fiddly, but it turned out really well. I'm happy with this little hat, even if John says it looks like an ice cream cone with candy sprinkles.

Above, the hat is just off the needles, unblocked. Like lace, colourwork definitely benefits from a good blocking. It makes all the difference!

Here, the hat is blocking. The pattern calls for a 10" plate to be used as a blocking board, but when I last made a beret, I had cut a 10" circle out of a good heavy cardboard box. After covering it with plastic wrap, it makes a perfect hat-blocking board and tucks away nicely in my sock drawer. That way, I always know where it is. Below is my favourite picture of this hat, the closeup.

Yup, I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I've slowly been putting together a box of things to send to my daughter. You've seen the three little pairs of mittens. I've blogged about the Armstrong Fair sweater and the little pair of shoes I found at the thrift store. There are one or two more things that need to be made before I send the package out to the coast. The first of those things is the Aviatrix Hat.

Above is NOT the greatest picture, but I have nothing around here that even remotely resembles a child's head. When I told Kristen that I'd made this hat for Ethan, she asked if he'd be able to pull it off his head; I told her it had a chin strap. It seems that, as a baby that has really own experienced summer, he doesn't like socks and he doesn't like hats; that makes sense as he really hasn't needed to wear them to this point in his young life.

The pattern is one I found on Ravelry (such an amazing resource!), by Justine Turner. In this case, the hat has become an Aviator Hat, as aviatrix is a female pilot and this hat is for a little boy. If you're on Ravelry, you can find a link to the pattern page here.

There are two more things I want to knit before the package goes out. First is another little teddy bear, Carolus #2, identical to the one I've already made for Trinity. The second one will be for Oceanna and, as I said, will be identical in all but colour. Trinity's was done in a variegated red/pink combination; Oceanna's will be knit in variegated greens, out of the stash.

The second thing I want to knit is a little surprise for Kristen; I think she deserves something a little special. I won't say yet just what it is I'm making for her, but I will say that I have the yarn in mind, something from the stash that was left over from another project. I found a pattern. I started the knitting and I frogged the knitting; the yarn and pattern weren't compatible. So I found another yarn and started over. Again, I wasn't happy with the combination of yarn and pattern, so attempt #2 was also frogged. Now, I've decided that I'll design a pattern just for her. It will be something of a combination of patterns that I've done in the past, but this little project will be unique to her... at least until I write up the pattern.

As I said at the beginning of this post, this week has flown by. Work has, once again, been very busy this week, with numerous large projects coming my way. Things are under control now, thankfully and yesterday, while the copier was churning out my last big job, I had some time to play around on Word, something I like to do to keep myself familiar with the program. Well, I've come up with a project, something that I've wanted to do for some time now.

As you know, both John and I enjoy cooking and we've collected quite a few favourite recipes over the years. I've decided to put our favourite recipes into a full on cookbook. Quite a few of our recipes are now on one of my finger drives, which I usually have with me at work, so I started putting the cookbook together yesterday afternoon. When I got home, I worked on it a little more. Right now, I'm up to 60 pages and it includes a table of contents and an index. Now, I'll have to go through the hard copies of recipes I've downloaded and recipes I've collected over a lot of years. Once done, I have every intention of making one copy for each of my children. And, right now, I'm having a lot of fun putting it together... as long as I remember to save often!

It's the weekend! I have every intention of relaxing and enjoying myself after a couple of very busy weeks at work. I hope that you, too, enjoy your weekend. Happy Halloween!