Baby hat love

Recently some very close friends on the East Coast had a lovely baby girl. Very soon after that, another friend  who also owns an Etsy business had her baby and ordered hats for the little darling. What did this mean? Lots and lots of baby hats to knit! Luckily for me, I have a large stash of KnitPicks Swish Worsted yarn in child-friendly colors, just waiting to be knit up! It sure felt odd knitting with such thin yarn, since I've been living in superbulky land for the past 6 months or so. Challenge accepted!

I had been eyeing the Golden Pear pattern by Melissa Thomson, and jumped on the opportunity to knit it up in bright green and rouge pink, toned down by a light dove grey. This hat went to my little East Coast lovie.

A few days after sending this off, I heard from my friend Melissa that she had had her baby and wanted a baby hat in this same pattern! Oh there was no hesitation on my part, as I was already in love with the pattern. Hers was shades of purple, with a little grey thrown in.

Now since I was on a roll, I figured, why stop now? I pulled out another new love, the Little Scallops hat pattern by Maria Carlander, and whipped up another hat in the same dove grey and Rouge Pink (those baby hats are addictive!!).

Full disclosure - I think this year's knitting might be full of baby hats, because they are fast, super cute, and you get to try out so many color combinations and yarns. My knitter hat is jumping for joy at the thought! Hope you'll join me for this next "level" in my knitting journey. :)

A QUICK NOTE

If you received or saw the spam post last weekend, I sincerely apologize for that, and reassure you that no user information was exposed, as the blog is separate from where your email addresses for the newsletter is stored and sent from. Once again, I'm so very sorry for the inconvenience caused.

How To : Make gift bags for a craft fair

I thought I'd give you all a break from my hat addiction and share with you how I made the goodie bags that I gave to all my customers in December last year, both at the Bazaar Bizarre Holiday Fair in December, and also orders I received online from my Etsy Shop. Here's what the finished goodie bag looked like. (Please forgive my photos, as I took them the night before the fair. The lighting is not too good.)

These goodie bags are very simple to put together, so you can be like me and make them the night before your 2-day craft fair and go to bed at 3am for a 6am call time (So fun! I would totally recommend it!...NOT :P), gather some friends together for a goodie-bag party, or make it a fun family activity. Either way, making the bags themselves is easy. It's making so many bags that takes time.

Here's what you need for your own set of goodie bags. Feel free to substitute your preferred goodies. It was Christmas, so I thought Chai tea and chocolate would give people warm thoughts, as they enjoyed my chunky handknits. :)

What You need

• Lime Green Organza bag, 4x6 (got mine from Papermart)
• Hang tags (From a local San Jose Etsy maker, The Paper Medley)
• Your business cards (I put 2 in each goodie bag. My cards are from Moo.com. Love them!)
• Goodies 1 (I got the Ghirardelli Chocolate Holiday Assortment pack from Costco)
• Goodies 2 (Good Earth Decaf Chai teabags)

TL:DR Instructions

Add your goodies 1 and 2, along with 1 or 2 business cards to the organza bag, tie the bag shut, and finish off with the hang tags. As an extra, I added a discount code to the back of the hangtags. :)

The Long version (with gratuitous use of photos, because...you know...I have lots of them)

The bags....

...and the tags (I love these tags!).

...but don't forget your cards!

And the tea...

...plus Ghirardelli (I'm so sorry for the rhymes...it's a late-night inspired thing that I can't seem to shake off).

Now for the haaaaarrrrdddd work! Add the 2 chocolate pieces and one tea bag to the goodie bag.

When that's done, take some extra photos just for fun.

 

Then add your pretty business cards, because you want your lovely customers to remember you when they're sipping on their tea, and munching on those delicious chocolate squares.

Now finish this up with your lovely hang tags, and you're good to go! Lots and lots of goodie bags for all!

Hope you enjoyed this long tutorial. See you next week!

An unexpected gift

I've been so quiet on here that it I wasn't sure how to break the silence. :( So I thought, why not just jump straight back in and share this awesome gift I received with you. About 5 months ago, in my regular 9-to-5 job, I came across a lookbook by one of my all-time favorite designers, Jared Flood of BrooklynTweed. Now if you've been reading my blog for a while now, you know how muchI admire (and covet) his work and talent. I was therefore beyond overjoyed to talk to our marketing team and ask if there was anyway we could work with them.

A few months have gone by now, and we'd been working on a few things with the BrooklynTweed team when this showed up in the office for me!!

Oh yes!! I get to try BrooklynTweed's Shelter yarn, and that gorgeous cabled hat pattern, Habitat! Woohoo! I can't wait! Can you feel my joy?

Then, to top things off, BrooklynTweed just came out with their new lookbook, Wool People 7! This girl is very happy over here!

A review of my favorites from this collection will be coming up shortly!

Have a great day and a lovely weekend, and thank you for sticking with me despite my long absence on this blog. :)

Gifts Ahoy! Part Deux

Of all my family members, I think my sister has the most handknit items from me. This holiday season was no different. I had knit one of my newest loves, a bulky slouchy striped hat (oh yes! I forgot to mention that I fell in love with hats this holiday season) in light grey and bubblegum pink. This hat right here. (I modified the Ushya Hat pattern by Jane Ellison to knit my hats.)

Missy said she wanted this very hat, and a scarf to go with it. I started a striped scarf to match the hat, but she wasn't digging the stripes, so we decided to just knit half the scarf in grey and the other half in pink.

However, after I'd finished knitting with the grey, I thought I'd add a touch of something, so I knit two rows in white before joining with the other color. Then I thought, why not add a bit more color? So in went some charcoal grey and a darker pink to round it out.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to take photos of my finished experiment before she left, but the gods of winter made her town so cold (3 degrees Fahrenheit) that she had to bust out these big guns. Here she is enjoying her gifts. :)

Enjoy the rest of your week, and stay warm!

Happy Birthday my little poopoola!

Today is my son's birthday! I can't believe it's been a few years already. This boy is now talking, singing, dancing and sharing his opinions, likes and dislikes, and even throwing tantrums for good measure! Now I've not knitted many things for him (poor boy!), but what I have knitted for him are hats. I think most of the hats I've knit belong to him. The first hat was the Simple Baby Hat by Alison Williams. I worked a 2x2 rib for the brim, but as you can see, that hat was too big for him. I hadn't yet understood what gauge was for, and didn't even think to check for it. Anyway, I thought he would grow into it so I made him wear it anyway. :P

For his second hat, I chose the Presto! Preemie Hat by Katherine Vaughan because it looked fun and quick. I had also gotten some mystery funky blue yarn from my manager Anna at FVPF (now Futures without Violence), so I whipped this hat up quickly for him. It was pretty tight on him. I still hadn't learned my lesson about gauge. :P

But, you know how quickly little kids grow. Since the Funky Andy hat was small to begin with, he outgrew it pretty quickly and I needed a new hat for him. I turned to the Aviatrix baby hat by Justine Turner. This has got to be one of my favorite hat patterns. It is simple, intuitive, and the finished product is just stunning. For this hat, I actually paid attention to gauge and it fit him much better compared to the other ones.

He wore the Aviatrix hat until he was almost 2 years old, and that got too small for him. It was winter time so I thought he needed a thicker hat. I cast on for the Chunky Dean Street Hat by Nina Machlin Dayton. I forgot all the gauge issues I had had with the first two hats and cast on for this one without checking gauge. Big mistake! Huge! As in, the hat was huge enough to fit my head. LOL! It was still cute, and he got a lot of attention whenever he wore it. Sadly, this hat is almost at the end of it's life too. I have to find a new hat pattern to knit for this fast-growing boy.

I've learnt one thing from all my no-gauge-taking hat-knitting travails - when it comes to knitting in the round, I'm such a loose knitter that I need to go two needles smaller than the recommended size on the pattern. That seems to work well for me. Hopefully I'll have another hat finished for this little one. He told me that he wants a purple and yellow hat. Maybe I'll try the Turn-A-Square hat by Jared Flood?

Or maybe it's time for me to try out a fair isle or intarsia pattern? There are so many to choose from though! The Sheep & Wool hat by Emily Spence is pretty tempting...

as is the Cheesehead hat by Julia Mueller.

Or should I go to a different way and try the Howlcat by Alex Tinsley? It can be a hat or a cowl!

Aaaarghhh!! So many choices, so little time.  Happy Birthday my little love. May you grow up to become a man of integrity with a kind and generous heart. I love you!

The joy of gift knitting - Part 1

I haven't knitted a gift for someone in a while, and so I was quite excited to make this quick gift for Claudine, our neighbor who has become a dear friend and another grandmother to my son. She follows my blog (hi Claudine!) and really liked the lacy mitts I posted about in this Short Sale blog post (PS: The headbands and mitts are still on sale, so please let me know if you'd like something). It turns out that our birthdays are one day apart! Such a fun coincidence, isn't it? So when Claudine custom ordered a pair of mitts, I thought it would be better as a birthday gift. Now even though our houses are separated by a fence, and we usually pass things over this fence all the time, for some reason I wasn't able to get her gift to her until last week. Here are a few pictures I took of her enjoying her mitts.

 Thank you Claudine, for being so wonderful, caring and supportive. :) I hope you enjoy your mitts!

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week. You won't believe what I made. I'm giddy with excitement about this set of gifts. :) Have a wonderful, wonderful week!

PS: Fundraising for Hurricane Sandy survivors is still ongoing

Please help me support those affected by Hurricane Sandy by purchasing something from the NiseyKnits shop. I will donate 25% of all proceeds from this month to the Red Cross and Samaritan’s Purse to help rebuild affected areas in New York and New Jersey.

A sneak peek, and fundraising for Hurricane Sandy survivors

I can't believe it's November already! Where is the year galloping off to? Frankly I'm a little frightened at the speed with which the years are passing by. Plus it means I have less time than I think I do for knitting. Oh well... For the past two weeks I've been super busy working on a pattern for a scarf and a matching hat. I have never designed a hat before, and it's been quite daunting. Figuring out the math for the hat was challenging, mainly because I wanted to keep the pattern on the hat even while shaping the top of the hat. Anyway, here's a sneak peek of this pattern. It should be out soon, just in time for Christmas gift knitting!

I hope you like it as much as I do.

Fundraising for Hurricane Sandy survivors

Please help me support those affected by Hurricane Sandy by purchasing something from the NiseyKnits shop. I will donate 25% of all proceeds from this month to the Red Cross and Samaritan's Purse to help in rebuilding affected places in New York and New Jersey.