Yarn Along:February's End

~ Two of my favorite things are knitting and reading, and the evidence of this often shows up in my photographs. 

I have long been absent from my blog and here I am making an appearance before February is over. I've been knitting constantly, but haven't shared at Ginny's Yarn Along in weeks. Today, I finally finished the Mini Mochi Fair Isle hat (2nd picture from the top) which was actually a lot of fun, if tedious at times. I've been working on this hat for a few months, but I've set it aside several times to cast on other hats. I really enjoy knitting on small needles and I really enjoy stranded knitting. I've been knitting hats non-stop as I have several hats promised for different friend. Just to get out of the hat rut, I also casted on  a little cardigan sweater for Tess in the midst of all the hat frenzy.


The first hat above is the hat I made for Tess for Valentine's Day.  I actually made this hat twice, but the hat (the picture below) came out too tight, small, and slouchy. I looked at the project notes on several of these hats on Ravelry and made some modifications to my next attempt.

As for reading, there's always a huge stack on the nightstand. Currently, I'm reading a different book to each of my older sons and my book club selection, Out of The Easy by Ruta Sepetys. We read her first novel, Between Shades of Gray (not to be confused with Fifty Shades of Grey! Good grief!) for book club and it was a gripping tale of Lithuania during World War II. The cover of that book is in my third photo above with yet another hat! Shocker!

My final photo is my what I call my yarn shop. Recently, I helped my best friend sort and organize all of her yarn. She asked for help and I'm always ready to help someone purge and organize. I didn't think it would take that long, but nearly four hours later, we unearthed over twenty project bags, missing double points and stitch markers, and organized all her on-the-needles projects in one convenient knitting bag. She decided that she wanted to put her yarn on a shelf so that she could better see what she had. I actually thought this was brilliant. Even thought I'm uber-organized, I still had yarn all over the place. I asked my husband to bring an unused book shelf up into our room and I proceeded to put every unused skein and hank on that shelf. I was shocked that I had so much yarn! It's true. I had to see it all together to really know how much I had. I guess it's stash-only knitting for a long long while!

Head on over to Ginny's for my yarn adventures!