merry christmas!

Charlie and the rest of us (me) here at JennLikesYarn wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas weekend!

Hope everyone has safe travels and lots of tasty treats to fill yourselves up with.  I've already started packing on the holiday pounds - or at least it feels like it!  I bless you with Christmas wishes of lots of yarn this holiday season :)

a crochet hat for hubby!

Only six days left!  And only half of those are good for crafting because the rest are spent wrapping the presents you should have had done months ago.  Oh, well :)

Anyway, I can't show you most of what I've been working on because of the fact they're Christmas gifts.  But I CAN show you this quick project that I whipped up over the weekend because Hubby has been complaining about a cold head for at least the past month.  Well, I did promise to make him a hat for our anniversary and never did... so that's probably why.  But here it is:





The light grey yarn is some leftover Plymouth Encore Tweed I had from a shopping trip Hubby and I took while vacationing at my parents' lake house.  The dark yarn is some leftover Vanna's Choice I had from knitting the gloves I posted last week.

I only combined the two colors because I was running out of the Tweed, but I think the result looks great.  It's actually a little too big on Hubby because he complained that his last hat didn't cover his ears - and it doesn't.  Even though I had added an extra inch to the pattern.  So I just threw this new hat together and he wore it all weekend.  Because he wubs me.

I finished up two other gifts this weekend and will probably finish the last one over the next couple days.  I guess I have no choice, though :)

altered knit "bella" fingerless mittens = done!

TGIF!  I've never been more excited to see a weekend.  Well, that's not true, but it's still pretty fantastic that I get to sleep in until 8AM tomorrow.  It's the little things in life, isn't it?

I'm just popping in to show you this pair of altered "Bella Mittens" for a custom order:









As you can see, I modified the original pattern (located here) a little bit.  The mittens no longer have a horseshoe cable because I separated them and added a 1x1 rib between them.  I also nixed the top of the mitten and changed it to half-fingers - something I'd never done before, so I'm kinda proud :)

I really love how these turned out, and I hope the person they're going to enjoys them as much as I do!  It was definitely a learning experience, and a fun one at that.  Every time I fudge a pattern and happen to do something correctly, I feel like I can conquer the world :P

Have a great weekend, everyone!

completed crochet zig-zag hat prototypes

Here are the prototype hats I finished crocheting on Monday night!  The pictures are terrible, since they were obviously taken in the evening, but hopefully you get the idea :)







The blue and black hat is the first one I made, and I wasn't too happy with the way the top or bottom came out, so I made the second one with all the super fun colors :P  I really enjoy them and want to alter the pattern a couple ways to a) make it slouchy and b) add ear flaps.  I think these would look super cute as ski caps!

In other news, I keep getting sick, and this is not the time of year to get sick!  I had a stomach bug at the end of the last week, and I think I feel another one coming on.  I just can't win and all I want to do is sleep - but of course, you can't sleep during the last week leading up to Christmas!

my weekend project(s)

Happy Monday!  As happy as a Monday gets, anyway.  The closer it gets to Christmas, the more I dread the weeks flying by so quickly.  Totally the opposite of when we were kids, right?

Anyway, I thought I'd pop in and show you part of a new crochet hat pattern I'm working on:

It'll be a zig-zag hat, but the bottom part will be flat.  I haven't seen too many of these hats floating around, so hopefully everyone will be able to get some use out of it!

I actually started making a second one last night and already modified a few things in my pattern, so we'll see how long it takes until "total perfection" - but I'd love to get it up before Christmas.  It's going to be a paid pattern, probably somewhere in the $3-$4 range, and I might add some ear flaps.  We'll see where this whacky world takes me!

So here's a fun story that'll induce nightmares to all knitters... I finished the second in a pair of gloves yesterday, only to discover I must have dropped a couple stitches somewhere in the pinky.  Needless to say, as I was trying to fix it, the entire pinky became unraveled... then eventually the left side of the glove became unraveled... I started to get really frustrated and Hubby wanted to kill me.

Eventually I just wove a piece of yarn through one of the rows just above the thumb gusset and ripped everything back.  We're in good shape again, but now I'm behind.  I really thought I'd be able to get those done and shipped out by this morning.  Crap.  So you can see why I needed to crochet a few hats.  I needed to feel productive.

Have a super-dee-dooper fun week, everyone!