So I’ve been knitting the Felicity Hat pattern by Wanett Clyde of the Ebony Butterfly  – I found the pattern and tons of advice on Ravelry .  And I must say I love this pattern! I just finished my 4th one in about 30 days! Everybody’s getting hats for Christmas – so you all better put in your color preferences now!

The 1^st one I made with 1 ½ skeins of Bamboozle from Crystal Palace Yarns in the Seascape color way (it was 40% off! I love sale yarn!).  I have to say this is a great yarn – I was worried when I cast on that it was going to be one of those yars that keeps pulling and splitting but I just tied a little knot at the very beginning of the yarn before I cast on and Voila! No problems! I want to find more patterns for this yarn because it was super easy to work with.

Anyway – that itself turned out too small.  My own fault – I don’t believe in swatching and I knew ahead of time (thanks to other Ravelers) that this pattern tended to run small – but C’est la vie! I cast on 80 stitches with 9” size 7 circular needles. I had no idea how to use circular needles – I just kinda guessed and it took me a good six rows to figure out that I didn’t have to purl! So that’s why the bottom edge looks a little funny. Switched to size 8 needles (and wow I see why that stupid set of needles was on sale for a buck – it’s awful!) where the pattern said to change. The problem occurred when toward the end I thought I knew what the pattern of decreases was… and I was wrong… so when I pulled the top together there was a rather large hole. Anyway – I’m just going to give it a Pompom! That’ll fix it.

The 2^nd one was made with 1 ¼ skins of Mosaic Twist from Yarn Bees in the Iced Fruit color way. (Sale for $2 a skein! Oh Yeah! It’s my b-day!) This was really thick yarn and combined with the tiny size 7’s throughout… oh my hands are still sore! That hat turned out nice but is pretty stiff – definitely a good winter hat.

This 3^rd & 4th have been the best so far.  The yarn is Cameo from Yarn Bees in the Titian Jewel color way (the orange one – not sure what the colorway on the blue one is) – also known by my husband as hunter orange.  Either way it’s super soft and since it’s 100% polyamide (I have no idea what that is…) it’s really drape-y. I used 7’s throughout again (‘cause I hate the 8’s I’ve got and I can’t find a 16” anywhere – they are all 29” long!) and I cast on 100 stitches.  I knitted instead of purled the first row and I’m adding an extra row in between the increase and decrease rows to make the hat longer. I love the yarn – although the fuzz makes the increasing harder.  If it didn’t have the fuzz I’d consider it for a sweater since it’s so soft!

Now I’m working on some matching arm warmers to match the blue & orange hats!

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about when I mention 7’s and 8’s and 16” verses 29” – fear not! For I shall be starting a ‘Tool’ tutorial that will talk about… well tools!  All the tools of the crafty trade, be they rocks or rocket launchers; if we can figure out how to craft with it – we’ll mention it here! I have a feeling I’ll learn quite a bit myself!

I met a local Raveler this past Monday (the 13th) – Mariaknittedit, and had an impromptu spinning lesson.  Ms. Maria is in the process of setting up a private fiber studio called Black Dog Studio. I went to her to critique the fiber I collected off 2 of my buns (most of it is woefully too short but when the mercury hits 100 – them’s the breaks) but in the process I was sent to the wheel myself!

Here’s the fiber we worked with from Moto, a lovely rain cloud gray:

And this is what Mariaknittedit spun out:

Then we carded some together with some white Merino wool and I spun this:

As you can see there are lots of little spirals in it where I totally overspun it (big feet move faster than my hands apparently) but still! If we had to have yarn I could make it! It would be ugly and weird – but we’d be warm! (at least till it all came apart because, you know, not a skill I’ve got down yet…)

And Ms. Maria is fabulous – hopefully I didn’t scar her too badly between my awful spinning and just plain weirdness.

Bunnies are freakin’ adorable! And man can they eat! They’ll be 5 weeks old in 2 days…

So I’ve learned an important lesson… 1 row of beans will not prevent the cross pollination of 2 types of cucumber… I planted Boston Pickling cukes and Lemon Cukes with a row of Blackeyed Peas in between, here’s what each looks like normally…

Boston Pickling:

And Lemon:

And here’s what you get when you plant them too close together…

Sigh… on the bright side, Harvey says they taste great… Otherwise, we’re drowing in monster Zucchini (seriously – you could take out a Zombie with these things), there are lots of Cherry Tomatoes we’re just waiting to turn Red (or white, depending).  I spotted the first crook neck yellow squash today and harvested a handful of the Dragon’s Tongue Heritage Beans.

According to Wikipedia, “Miniature wargaming is a form of wargaming that incorporates miniature figures and modeled terrain as the main components of play.”

I am, personally, a fan of Warhammer 40K which has a ‘gothic space fantasy setting’.

While I’ve played a sum total of 3 games, I have a large army that I’ve been pretending to work on for about 6 years.  Now don’t let that scare you. Yes, if you buy a box of this stuff your going to get a box of tiny plastic heads, arms, legs, wheels, chassis, tank turrets, etc, and yes you are going to have to put them together (unless you cheat and buy a fully assembled/painted army from EBay – but that would just be wrong!), but there are endless opportunities to modify and personalize your army.  It can be anything you want it to be.

To my credit, I managed to get 1 piece done – The Chaos Marine’s Defiler.  Granted, I believe this is the biggest piece offered by Games Workshop – and in my opinion the coolest.  I mean it’s a giant metal spider, with a skull on it! How cool is that? It took me 2 days – a total of 24 hours. I was really rather pleased with how it turned out… and then I couldn’t even look at the smaller units.  Since then I’ve done a little bit on my guys – but not a whole lot.  I keep telling myself I need to do it…

But my favorite thing about this game is the scenery – the terrain. My first experiment was really for a game called MageKnight and involved turning AOL cds and Styrofoam into craters… it was so easy! And fun! And I think they turned out really realistic looking! From that point on I was hooked. I would go to Lowes to wander the aisles re-imagining all the bits into space age/alien/techno goodness. I would go to TerraGenesis to drool over other people’s projects.  It’s amazing what some Styrofoam, play sand, Elmer’s glue, and some acrylic drink stirrers can turn into.  And now LED lights are coming into play!

It’s literally limitless what you can do – and who says you have to limit it to War games? Why can’t it be sculpture? Or an interesting piece of wall art? Hmmm?

Here is one of my earlier experiments. This is made with tennis balls on foam core covered in a white glue/wall filler paste – it reminds me of the scenery from Alien. This is one piece of a set of 3… the other two smaller pieces have wandered off along with my CD craters…