I Made a Thing

When I finished my handspun socks last week, I was kind of at a loss for what to do next. I still had a fair amount of handspun leftover, and I needed something to work on during lunch on Friday, so I decided to knit a tube. You saw it in progress earlier this week, but now it's officially done.

I didn't use any pattern for this; I simply estimated how many stitches I'd need based on the socks and made adjustments as needed along the way. This is such a non-thing, really, that I didn't even bother to make a Ravelry project page for it. So, what is it? I'm intending to use it as a soft case for my sunglasses (they came with a hard case, but it's rather big and does not fit into a smaller purse). It also works well as a sock for a cell phone, if you need such a thing. The "pattern," if you can call it one, was simple: I cast on 60 stitches, knit five rounds, purled a round, knit five more rounds, and joined the cast-on edge on the next round for a turned hem. Then I knit until it was long enough to cover my sunglasses. Before grafting, I did a couple of decrease rounds as I would at the beginning of a sock toe. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, as my daughter would say. It's not much, but it was a way to use more of this beautiful yarn (and there's still a bit left of it, if you can believe it -- it's like the magical skein that never ends).

So after that was done, I needed a new small-ish project for my lunch knitting. I decided to cast on for a new hat, another Madelinetosh original design for Mad May. I'd sketched out an idea for the stitch pattern earlier in the week, so I decided to give it a try. I happened to have a skein of tosh DK in Dr. Zhivago's Sky already wound, and I cast on after putting Rainbow to bed. Unfortunately, the sketch I'd made had disappeared, and once I redid it, I realized that the number of stitches I had cast on was not a multiple of the stitch count for the pattern. Oops. So I ripped and started over, and that's why there's not much to see here.

This hat isn't going to be terribly complicated. The stitch pattern is a mix of twisted knit stitches and purls -- I guess you could say that I haven't gotten the twisted stitch obsession out of my system just yet.

Tomorrow is my gum surgery, and while I'm not exactly looking forward to it, I will say that I don't mind having to lay low for a couple of days. I have about four episodes of Mad Men to catch up on and a lot of sweater knitting to do.