Looking for Love in Alderaan Places!

I love fair isle knitting, I think it looks fab and it's really fun to knit up. That's why I enjoyed making the Frolicking Reindeer hats so much.

[Unfortunately, I didn't take a photo of the first one I made before I gifted it to a friend]

 

 

 

 When I was trawling the internet, looking for a pattern to use on the inside of the blue reindeer hat, I happened upon a bunch of geeky fair isle patterns - Doctor Who, Star Wars, Zelda etc. and I pinned  them on my Pinterest account for future use. A few weeks later, I was looking for something to put in the square allocated to another Star Wars pattern and I suddenly had a brilliant thought; why not use part of that fair isle pattern I'd put away for a rainy day [or to make a scarf next winter]?

So I headed over to Doodlewhale's site and grabbed the chart, which turned out not to be a knitting chart at all but a design for a fair isle style t-shirt; it worked brilliantly anyway. I picked out my favourite bit - the AT AT Walker getting all tied up - and set to work.

Square number 25: Star Wars: AT AT Walker

I think that this is my favourite square yet, it looks great and I'm happy that I decided to go with navy and white rather than black and white - it feels more snowy and wintery.

Weirdly enough, when I was half way through knitting this square, the lovely Kaleidiscope  on Ravelry.com noticed that I'd made some Star Wars projects and linked me to another Star Wars fair isle scarf pattern that also has an AT AT on it. Such a cool coincidence. Plus I loved the pattern she linked me to so keep an eye out for that, I'm hoping to make it later this year.

Not So Frolicking Reindeer (Or The Family Friendly Version)

Wow, it's been a couple of weeks since I last blogged; time really flies when you're ill and then super busy with other stuff. Yep, I got that whole flu bug that's immune to the flu jab lurgy again and this time passed it on to my dad, who passed it on to my mum etc... It's a nasty little bug and I hope you've managed to avoid it.

But in far nicer news, my new sublimation printer is here! My new mug heat press is here! It's time for a whole new venture! It'll be sad to move away from having t-shirt printing as my main business but big sites like Qwertee and Teefury have knocked my little Ebay shop for six and I've been really struggling for the past year. A new direction was needed and I hope my sublimation printer will lead the way. I'll be overhauling my Ebay shop and building up my Etsy shop and I'll keep you updated on that.

In my last post, I mentioned knitting another Reindeer hat (this is the third one I've made so they're pretty popular this winter). This particular version was for my father-in-law who didn't want the naughty reindeer side to his hat so I had to try and find a new design that he'd like. I eventually found a lovely little cottage design that would work nicely with the trees that were already in the reindeer pattern. This time I worked the hat up in navy and dusky blue colours and I think it looks great; the alien from Toy Story agrees...

With the two sides to the hat, the width is the perfect size but it's a very long hat which works well for my husband but I did remove some of the pattern to make it a little smaller for my father-in-law. It still looks great though and it'll definitely keep him warm on his early morning milk round.

The Happy, Froliking Reindeer *ahem*

I've finished that hat I was telling you about (and am now back to the Banket of Doom grindstone) so I thought I'd do two posts today; one for the hat and one for the next square.

Last winter my husband told me about a new jumper that Queens of the Stone Age had come out with "in that knitting type style, you know what I mean". This was before everyone and their brother had printed fair isle t-shirts so he had to pull a picture up on his phone for me and I saw this pretty hilarious jumper.

But I had the feeling that it would be even funnier if it was more pixilated and knit-like or, even better, actually knitted.

Then I forgot all about it until a few months ago when I was looking for a hat to knit for a friend and stumbled across Kat Mcab's Frolicking Deer Hat It was perfect and when I showed it to my husband he got that puppy dog look which means he really wants me to make him something. Of course, I was busy with the blanket and the giant queue of stuff behind it so I couldn't start it until last week when we went visiting the in-laws and I didn't want to take a huge bag of wool with me.

I went with a lovely wine colour and a contrasting silver grey. It took about a week to make as you're basically making two hats in order to make it double-sided. That was probably a good thing because it meant I only worked on the 'parental friendly' side of the hat while at the in-laws.

Here is the finished hat, modelled by my very camera-shy husband.

Parental friendly side of the hat

Non-parental friendly side of the hat

Kat states on the pattern page that this is an XXL hat but I found that the width was fine because the doubling up made the hat very thick and warm. It did, however, make the hat very long which looks good on my husband but I think I'm going to have to find a way to make the hat shorter when I make one for my father-in-law. Of course, because he asked me to make him one based on the fact that he'd only seen the non-naughty side, I'll have to come up with a new pattern for the other side of that hat anyway.