Granger Danger

Now that school's out and I can't stand to wake up any later than eight, I have no excuse not to blog. So, for the next few months, I can put all those English classes to use and share with everyone how I fill my surplus of time. And by Georgie, it had better be entertaining.

I'll begin with my latest creation: a hat. But not just any hat. Hermione's hat, from the sixth movie. It all started with that two-week trip to the east coast, during a certain visit in the Amish country. We'd stopped in Intercourse (tee hee) and were browsing the little knick-knack shops for purchasable goods when my parents notified me about a yarn store in the area. The Lancaster Yarn Shop. Just what I'd been hoping for. A quick pace brought me up a small flight of stairs into a cozy little store full of woolen skeins and hand-dyed hanks in just about every color nature has to offer. After an agonizing sight of the price of truly local hand-spun Amish yarns, I settled on a Brown Sheep Co. mohair/wool hank of about 4 oz. It was a splendid green, one I'd describe as a hilly pasture after a summer rain, complete with a rainbow and highland cows lazily grazing. As it seemed to me to be somewhat thinner than my usual yarns, it had to be made into something delicate and beautiful. I decided to make a hat out of it, a knit one, and as soon as I was home from the trip I set out to find such a pattern.

Google is a wonderful thing. A few keywords, and like man's best friend the search engine brought back what I was looking for.

http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/features/crafts/knitting/hermionescableeyelethat

Delicate, no? It was the perfect hat for this yarn, I reckoned. There was just one thing, one tiny thing....cables. I'd never done cables. I've knitted plenty of hats, (baby hats, panda hats), but they were all just that. Knit. Nothing spectacular, just knit, knit, knit. This involved cabling, or knitting stitches out of order. Needless, to say, it was intimidating...but I like a good challenge. I knitted half of the brim and was overwhelmed by other things demanding my attention, (school, dance practices, graduation), so I put off finishing it for a long time, but just a few days ago I picked it up again and finished it! Cabling wasn't as tough of an ordeal as I thought it would be, but it made knitting tighter, and therefore more difficult. Regardless of the obstacles, it turned out to be a pretty cute hat, and I even took a picture of it...

And you can find the pattern at this blog. I only made a few small changes: a K2, P2 brim instead of the K1, P1, (which is not like Hermione's hat, I know, but I like a stronger looking brim) and in her 4.5 errata round, instead of K6, K2tog, I wanted to finish the purling sections with K6, P2tog.

So, there you have it! A blog post from me with a cute hat pattern to boot. I should get out of school more often...