Little Magic

Wow! Look at this! I have a blog post up during a normal person's waking hours!
Today, we're talking about little bits of magic. You know the kind I mean; the things that are so amazingly simple, but seem so fantastic; the things that take raw materials and make something entirely different. That's magic.
That's knitting.
Knitting is the simple act of taking string and two sticks and making clothes! (Hopefully good clothes) But the thing is, you aren't just limited to clothes! There are all kinds of things that people have knit! People have knit earrings, purses, headbands (is that an article of clothing?...hmmm...), and even BOATS (Yes, that's right, there is someone out there who has knit a boat).
Today, I'm going to show you some of my knitting.
I thought I'd start the project montage off with a bit of humility and show you my first project ever. I had intended for it to be a cat-eared hat. Suffice to say, that didn't happen.



And here's the other side:



See those sad droopy corners? Yeah, cat ears.
Anyway, I have in fact created two very serviceable and very cute cat eared hats since this debacle, I don't have pictures of those because they are owned by other people, but they exist!

Now that I've thoroughly smashed my knitting ego before all of you, I'm going to attempt to restore it by showing you my latest hat.



The pattern is "Knotty But Nice" by Natalie Larson. Instead of the yarn suggested, I used Cascade Peruvia. I like it...a lot. I've yet to block it, but I will.
Here's a side view:



That cabling was so complicated and fun! I sped through the whole thing (I cast it on December 23rd, and had it done for myself on Christmas morning).

This pattern was one of those special ones where, as long as you do the pattern right, the knitting is going to look really awesome! However, there is knitting where the pattern is ridiculously basic, but the yarn makes it AWESOME!
Case in point:



That's two different colors of Noro yarn (One Silk Garden, one Kureyon), in a 1x1 ribbing, where I changed the working color every 2 or 4 rows depending on how I liked the stripes length. That sounds complicated when you write it out, but I promise, that's pretty basic knitting. The thing that makes that scarf my absolute favorite (and the thing that makes it a real crowd-pleaser) is the colors, not the pattern. That's pretty fantastic when you think about it. This yarn is so awesome, that you could do all kinds of crazy things with it, and it would be gorgeous, because the colors ROCK!

So, that in a nutshell is why I like knitting so much. It's magical. Go figure.

Thing to be grateful for today: Knitting.