Project #14 Ciclamino

This is another hat. I looked up ciclamino which really is Cyclomen plant in Italian which I also had to look up and to my small disappointment the plant looks nothing like this yarn. But .. I love this yarn. It's a rope but sometimes it has color and makes it so cute to knit with. I need to do 5" again but I was not told not to come back this time.

3rd
Miserable. I did not use the odd yarn when I started knitting the hat and hat to pick up stitches from the cast on end which was pure hell and took hours. I ended up with 107 stitches.. instead of 108. I will be wondering forever where #108 went because it does not look like I dropped it. I don't know. My fingers hurt a lot.

8:58 PM
I want to know how I ended up with 2 balls of yarn.. I only had one.

10:16 PM
I found stitch #108. It was on the side by itself as suspected. I am not sure what to do with it since there is not an equivalent I can knit it together with. Exhausted. This opening photo is an embarrassment. Where is the odd yarn?!!

4th
I am sick. I assume it's because I spent some time on a metal chair yesterday and there was no heat in the room but could be another reason. Besides my fingers hurt so much I can barely type. I took out the brown string from the hat but now I have to figure out what she had in mind by doing it the way she did. Like why did we decrease 2 rows "in a row"? Anyway.. I should just do something on my own. I have all the info which is decrease to 80 and then the decrease itself. Someone was sewing yesterday.. like a garter part and the instructor said "It took me years to figure that out" and I really wanted to know what "that" was but was too tired to open my mouth.

Technical:
If you double the lining in knitting you can put all sorts of stuff behind it.. like hide strings and pull through if you need yarn for sewing and it happens to be on the other side. Like for the ear flaps on my hat.. there are a billion strings inside. I like that.

5th
Sick.. very. I was so excited about this hat and I made such a mess out of it. This is like the 5ht time I am undoing something on it. I feel like the yarn I am using does not want to be a hat at all if that makes any sense at all. I called the instructor today and she sounded sick too. I wonder why. Love the way I said 5th above.

8:55 PM
I am reading the above and it's like the diary of an abused knitter.. I pulled out the brown string out again. I have no idea what she had in mind. I should really get a mind of my own because I was not thrilled with the way we handled my mom's hat where the gray met the multi but possibly there is not a better solution.

2:24 AM
Sick.

7th
Better. I had 102.9F.. Back to torturing hat. I definitely am not doing the brown line. It's too thin.. but then so is the place where we connected the 2 pieces but I do not want to increase that space more then needed.

6:03 PM
I am putting a lot of effort into trying to disobey my instructor but have not come up with anything decent. Let's see.. I decreased on the purl side but I know I am not supposed to do that for some unknown reason so I undid that.. then I tried to knit with this tiny piece hanging off the side so I could decrease on the knit side even though I knew it was not enough ... it was not enough .. undid that, then I tried to use one multi and one red and then did not like the red and now I am going to use one brown and one multi and decrease on the right. I think all these useful activities raised my temperature back up. "Raised temperature back up.." that's redundant. This poor hat. If it ever gets done one day it will separate in half exactly at the place where I am at now. I am certain of it.

6:56 PM
Reading into the instructor's mind..
I think she pulled the string through the inside of the hat so I would not knit it by accident. And then like I could use it to sew later. That's all it was. I could not figure this out for the life of me since like Tuesday night. Brain .. where art though.. I don't even know where that is from.. maybe like a Shakespearian play?

7:38 PM
I cut the yarn. If you have one ball and you need to use double yarn the instructor pulls another end out of the "end" and uses one from the beginning and one from the end. She says unrolling everything and re-rolling is a waste of time.. however I have not learned how to knit like that without getting absurdly tangled. I just spent the past hour trying to unravel the current set up which is one from end one from the beginning. I don't know how she does it. The yarn is twisty by design so this setup just allows for more twists and tangles. I am 99 F again. I swear it's this hat.

9:38 PM
I think I am going to run out of yarn. Now what.

8th
3:15 AM
Coffee. I undid everything and did the brown yarn except I doubled it so now I have this huge puffy rim around the hat. I kind of like it but I feel if the instructor takes one look at it she will have a fit and justly so. I don't think this is what she had in mind. The idea was to use another yarn so I would have enough multi to finish the hat but this brown belt gave me 3 more rows aka maybe 1/3 of an inch which is not enough. Let me clarify this.. the above was my idea. Her idea was to have a nice hat.

10:49 PM
Have not gotten anywhere with this hat. I am back to where I left off a week ago.. not sure what to do after the bottom rim. I am wondering about the number 3. On Masha's hat I had to rib for 3 rows, here I had to do brown which I did not do which was K, K, P for 3 which is I think reverse garter. I wonder what reverse garter is all about and what 3 is all about because you end up on the wrong side of the item?

Sigh ..

9th

Brown line

OK. I ran out of yarn again with the brown line. I barely have 5" and I need 5 1/2 and then to decrease. Why does she make the line in garter? Why not stockinette. This garter thing totally reminds me of a king. I don't know why. I feel silly saying it here because the above does not remind me of a king but the garter line always reminds me of a king's crown. I actually just Googled crowns and believe it or not I cannot find one with a garter line on it but something in it still reminds me of the king. Now it's going to bother me. I feel like the next hat I make should be a crown. That would be cute. We can stick buttons on it. Instructor will love that.

11:51 PM

Color in blur..

I am missing all the funny things on Jay Leno.

10th
7:20 PM
Went in today. Instructor told me to use Malabrigo together with the above yarn and it looked good at first but then I realized that we totally took away this yarn's self striping personality. It made me sad. So now I am doing the top as a single yarn which defeats the original purpose of making the top of the hat another texture. I spent several hours today turning my self made double stranded yarn back into single. Tired. Still very weak from the flu. My brown line is perfect now.. done on #6.. how can it not be? Now I have to do 2 1/2 inches on #6 with 108 stitches per row. The brown line is reverse stockinette and not reverse garter. If you think about it reverse garter makes no sense whatsoever since it's the same on all sides.. as in both sides. I don't know why you cannot say purl instead of reverse stockinette to avoid massive confusion.
8:55 PM
I just realized that the yarn self stripes only if you start from the beginning. If you start from the end of the ball it stripes but not like it supposed to.

11th
12:35 AM
Not loving the decrease. I have to redo it the question is how? The hat has waves again. We had this on Masha's but I thought it was because we ran out of yarn. On my hat we did not have that but we had a weird decrease. Other then that .. I am happy with the hat. It's cute and the brown circle looks nice. I just saw The Crew of US Airways Flight 1549 on David Letterman whom I never watch. What a great group of people.. "brace for impact"

2:20 AM
Look at this time. I undid some of the decrease up to where I knitted 2 together. I am thinking maybe she likes this wavy decrease. It does look nice on the fake styrofoam head.. just not on mine. However I am not sure I should be left with like 20 stitches at the top. The hat is very cute and it's just simple. She did a good job. I have no idea where to sew it at the top. I tried and like had no idea where to put the needle in plus I am still haunted by this start motion technique.


7:27 AM
Almost done. Now just the finishing although the finishing photo will not look any different from the above. I need a longer project otherwise the photo amount becomes overwhelming even to me.

12th
Left a message for the instructor yesterday about the 15 stitches left at the top. She said she has to see this hat. I am really wondering why? I feel like between her expertize and my expertize we could have figured something out on the phone.

14th
I went to see the instructor yesterday. She said the hat was too short. That I have to undo until the 1st decrease, measure and then use up all my yarn that I have. I saw a man today in Whole Foods carrying a huge bouquet of red roses. The funny thing is minutes before that I saw him and found him somewhat attractive. This was before I saw the flowers. This sounds a little like the missed connection postings all over the world. I am going to stay in for the rest of the day.. this way I can avoid all the visuals. The color red generally reminds me of a hospital and only then I begin to think otherwise. Anyway back to knitting .. she told me to undo and measure but I just undid which was beyond stupid. Now what? I may as well kept it the way it was. I hate mathematical calculations and even the slightest insinuation that there may be calculations present makes me act like the above. How was I going to measure how much I had left? Anyway.. will just knit and waste time.. the usual.

4:41 PM
I used up everything I had.. on the hat and I mean everything. Now I have to bring it to the instructor since I have nothing to sew the hat with.

15th
I guess if you make the hat tall enough like more then 5.5 then it looks OK with the sudden decrease.

17th
Done. The instructor sewed most of it together. I wonder if I will ever be able to sew like her. She fixed a cable today and said that she will do the other one because it takes a lot out of her. Interesting. I only thought knitting took a lot out of me.. things like zippers and finishing that used to put me on the verge of a stroke.

End

PS..
I wonder if there will be #15 or anything else for that matter ... to be continued .. or not.

19th
Periodically I read this blog and I am in disbelief as to how nothing I knew about what I was talking about at all when it came to all the knitting references mentioned here. The very amusing thing is that not a single thing here makes sense maybe up until 2009.. not one! My instructor would be in stitches if she read any of this.. or more she would be like is this really one of my students?! can someone say comprehension? By the way I do not like the way the hat looks on my dad. It's not the right color and the top of his hat is pointy so the hat waves are extra wavy. I don't know if he likes it either. I will be sad if he does not.