Christmas & Winter Projects

As promised, here are my Christmas and winter projects:
I received a couple of orders for gifts - a hat and scarf set (using Lion Brand Homespun black), scarf knit on the pink Knifty Knitter loom and Hat on the round green KK loom

and a green and white scarf using Homespun Deco and Green Apple, knit on the pink KK loom:

I also made a scarf using Homespun Colonial as a Christmas gift for a dear friend's Mom, but I don't have a picture of the completed scarf. She was delighted to receive it.

Though the same dear friend of mine gave me a delightful Santa hat that was decorated with glittery poinsettias, and I wore it through the entire Christmas season, I had decided several months earlier that one of my projects was going to be a Santa hat. When I was at the yarn festival in Rheinbeck, NY, I had bought some deep red Cascade Yarns Magnum Peruvian Highland Wool for the purpose of making the Santa hat. It is like roving, with a gauge similar to Lion Brand's Thich & Quick. So just before Christmas I knit it (1 over 1 stitches):

Instead of using a series of decreasing stitches to make it, I simply used all of the KK round looms (including the flower loom). I started with the green roound loom and knit off several rows to make the bottom of the hat. Then I used the yarn needle to bind off with a separate piece of yarn instead of the tail from the working yarn. I then carefully put the loops from the yarn onto the next smaller size round loom, combining a few loops on one peg near the anchor peg to accomodate for the decrease in size. I continued this process until the hat was finished. You can see in the photo above where I combined loops when I switched looms. I used this as the back of the hat.

It makes for a continuous knitted look, as opposed to knitting the hat in sections and sewing the sections together. I'm sure there are different ways to make the hat, but I wanted to experiment with this way first. The yarn is so stiff, the hat can stand up on its own without much effort:

The brim and the pom pom are made of white eyelash yarn, and I used the Lion Brand pom pom maker to make the pom pom on top.

Two other projects I made for myself were a scarf that I knit up using 1.75 skeins of Lion Brand Homespun tulips yarn.

The flash on the camera made the yarn appear brighter than it is. As soon as I saw this yarn in the store, I knew I wanted to use it to create a scarf to wear with my brown coat. The yarn has just the right shade of brown mixed in with it to match the coat, and magenta is one of my favorite colors.

My last project for myself was a blue scarf using 3 skeins of Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thich & Quick Navy yarn. I had been wanting to knit a blue scarf to match the blue hat I had made last year, so I finally got around to it. I used the KK purple loom to knit it, since the pegs are spaced farther apart than the smaller looms, and I knew I wanted my scarf to be flexible, not stiff. The scarf is about 8 feet in length, and it is warm, cozy and fashionable.

Next time: my Valentine.