Cousteau

Finished the hat for my dad. My mom's hat is here. My parents are going on an Alaskan cruise soon, so I figured they should have wool hats from their knitter daughter. I'm trying to imagine them walking around the deck, looking at the glaciers, wearing my hats... Do they get to cruise by the glaciers? Not too close, though? Probably would want to avoid a titanic disaster.

Anyway, this is the Jacques Cousteau hat. My dad, a scuba diver, will get a kick out of this. Yes, he will get to wear this on a ship. Ha! When I mentioned it over the phone to my mom, she knew exactly what I was making. The end product looks great, and I'd be glad to wear it myself. But knitting an entirely ribbed hat in BLACK yarn is so boring. While you're working with the yarn, the black color makes it hard to see what's going on. It just isn't a fun color to knit with. This should've been a fast knit, but it took probably two weeks start to finish. Other knitters know what I mean. Personally, I wear lots of black but prefer not to knit with it.

Pattern: Jacques Cousteau hat by Typy

Yarn: Cascade 220 wool (less than one skein)

Needles: size 7 (4.5mm) dpns

Hat model: Simon (not my dad)

Fiery Fish Scales

I'm on a roll with these Cookie A sock patterns. Here's Pomatomus!


Yarn: Mountain Colors Bearfoot (60% superwash wool/ 25% mohair/ 15% nylon)
Color: Firestorm
Needles: size 2 (2.75mm) dpns

For the longest time, I considered this pattern to be too hard for me to even think about knitting. I knew it was incredibly popular, but I couldn't see how to knit those curved fish scales. I admit that I hadn't even looked at the written pattern when I made that "informed" decision. Ha! Then, last month, I had such a good experience knitting the Monkey socks that I printed out the Pomatomus pattern and jumped right in. It really wasn't that hard. Yes, I made two changes to the pattern but I didn't really deviate from the pattern.

To get the twisted rib look for the fish scale definition, you have to knit through the back loop. However, for any decreases, it was physically hard for me to knit two stitches together through the back loop. Everytime I came to that point, my knitting would stall. So, I changed it to k2tog from the front, the regular way. No biggy. Once I made that change, everything was much easier.



I also made a regular slipped stitch heel, instead of the twisted rib heel. I know it interrupts the "scaly" pattern down the heel, but I really wanted a thick heel.

I used up almost the whole skein of yarn too. Not much for leftovers! Nice. Plus, I love the "fiery" red color.