This week I’ve continued with the hats, and have now finished off four adult-sized beanies, all in luxurious Woolganics. They feel super-warm! I repeated the randomly generated stripes in the green-blue-cream hat – it’s really fun seeing what will come next.  I decided I’d have a play with some more simple colourwork designs, but this one didn’t turn out quite as clearly as I hoped. The base number of cast-on stitches for this size (104) is a difficult one to play with – it’s 13 x 8, so to fit the pattern evenly around, repeats either need to be 13 or 8sts wide. This one is an 8st repeat: maybe I should have played with 13sts for my idea. I’ve plenty more yarn for another hat!

Just as well I made no promises about weekly updates: it's been a fortnight since the last post. Since then it's still been all about hats. After my last post, my bestie dropped over a massive bag of her yarnie odds and ends, so I've been having fun playing with her yarn too - though the massive reduction I'd imagined in my own stashed left-overs hasn't quite happened ;) It's all good...

This week has been all about hats for me: a friend of mine works with refugee families and made a plea for warm things for her people - ideally scarves and blankets, but (IMO) they're long and boring to knit, so I asked if I could make hats instead.

So in the last week, I've made 7 beanies - in about the same amount of time as it would have taken me to knit one scarf, in my reckoning. And scarves look a lot more scrappy in lots of different yarns than stripy hats.

This week I've continued to fight with my swift, and it's been a frustrating experience. Mothers' Day is coming up on Sunday so I'm taking the family for a drive in the hills, namely to Sassafras, which I hear has a good yarn shop. Which potentially may sell swifts.

I thought, while I was busy reclaiming yarn, I might re-skein a couple of balls of yarn that I'd wound a couple of years ago and hadn't used. I wound them at the yarn store I bought them at, while travelling in the UK: their swift didn't turn very freely, so these balls were wound really tightly. OK if using them straight away, but storing the yarn under tension for any length of time is bound to end up with the yarn getting all stretched and losing its elasticity, and not being so good. And I had two of these balls, each 400m of fingering (4ply) weight yarn.

In an effort to get myself bloggin again, I thought I'd try to write every Thursday (or as often as I do...) about what I've been working on during the week.

This week, I've visited the frog pond. "Frogging" is knit-speak for ripping something out (ie, "rip-it, rip-it"), and sadly that's what I've been doing over the past couple of days. It always seems like such a waste of work, to have to rip out all those hours of knitting - but, it's a waste having a garment that you won't wear, so reverting the garment back to its yarny potential is actually quite exciting. Once you take the plunge, anyway!

In March I knit the Sinnesfried vest, in Malabrigo Rios, Solis colourway. I thought I was short on yarn, so rather than knitting the opening the full length, I opted for adapting it to just having a short mock front opening (one layer, with buttons for decoration).

I'm very happy to announce that the Little Hipster Cardigan and Beanie patterns are now available for public sale.

These patterns were published in the September 2012 edition of the UK knitting magazine, Knit Now, and so I had to wait four months until I was able to publish them myself. It's very exciting that that day has now come!

I'm working to put all my knitting work together in one site - my patterns, my videos, and a gallery of my pictures. In this tab I'll (hopefully!) blog about my current projects and designs.

Back to work!