Progress (or not) on the flat-top hat

So I started on the flat top hat following the directions and thought it was going to be a tad small. I took it apart and started over again... this time with 96 stitches rather than the 84 it called for. I got pretty far along (see the photo) and realized I was doing something wrong. Obviously it looks okay, but there are major problems. Maybe not major, but it's coming undone and I'm starting over again. I think I know where I went wrong. I still have ideas for knitting a copy of the Nepali hat though. And I will be trying to socks too. All this while getting ready to move to Denver!!! Mountains!! Here
we come!!

The hat from Nepal

So I bought two really great knit hats for probably a buck each back in '94 (or maybe '95) when I was in Nepal with the Peace Corps.

I still have both and still adore them. However, the first one (a green one) has almost completely had it. I still wear it some, but it's really thin and worn out and lost almost all of its color. It still has a place in my heart though. The grey one is still holding its own. Both are almost 12 years old now but they're wonderful. I only wish I'd bought more. I now want to try to recreate them on my own.

I've just bought a pattern for a flat top hat and have started on it, but will also try to just copy the Nepali hat that I have. We'll see how it goes. I also bought some sock yarn and will try a pair of socks next. I believe I'm going to use the Thuja pattern from Knitty... saw it on Jon's Colorado Knits blog.

What to do with the leftovers?

So I've finished quite a few projects over the last couple of years. I have all this yarn sitting around and want to start another project... my urge of course is to find a project, go buy the yarn I want/need, and start it. But what about the yarn I have? Yesterday we had a house showing and had run out of fruit for the fruit bowl, so Matt filled it with yarn. I thought, "Good idea!" And it was a good idea. But still, I want to knit with it.

Another dilemma... I've misplaced my two sets of double-pointed needles and I sort of wanted to start another project with them. It's driving my crazy. They could be just packed up somewhere. I'm not terribly organized with the knitting yet, although Matt did get a nice bag from a friend when he started knitting a couple of years ago. She'd bought a denim bag and painted "Born to Knit" on it with some sort of paint pen. It's great. Marcel loves it too. Here he is on his favorite chair with the favorite bag and his favorite throw, which I finished just a couple weeks ago.

Leaving the Midwest...

The mountains are calling again... it's time to go. Matt and I moved to the Indianapolis area about two years ago from Charlottesville, Virginia. He had just received his PhD in Spanish literature from UVa and took a position as an assistant professor at Wabash College, located in west central Indiana and one of the last three all male colleges in the country. I'm a librarian and found work at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis. As we left Charlottesville, the Blue Ridge gave way to the hills of West Virginia. Beautiful and old mountains... I'd come to love the mountains as a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal back in the mid-90s. Matt is a native of Utah and was raised by the Wasatch Mountains. Through West Virginia and on into the Ohio Valley, the land slowly becomes an ironed-out flatland full of soy and corn as far as the eye can see. And interstates. Indiana, the "Crossroads of America" - connecting Louisville to Chicago, Cincinnati to Champaign-Urbana, Columbus to St. Louis - check out a road atlas, it looks like an octopus landed on Indianapolis. The state motto, "The Crossroads of America", as if nobody stops there... but we did. Our ship landed in Lebanon, Indiana... a sleepy little Indiana county seat with a beautiful courthouse and affordable Victorian homes. We came with our cat, Leona, who got lost in the attic on day one. She has been joined by the brothers Juan and Marcel. Exhausted from unloading, Matt and I took a break for dinner and walked to a little Chinese joint on the courthouse square. Sitting down, we looked into each others' eyes and were suddenly confronted with the reality of our situation... "Oh my god! What have we done!!" I think tears were shed a little bit. I believe day three was July 4th, so we walked down to watch the Lebanon Independence Day Parade, standing in front of the First Baptist Church. Wow. Were we so naive then? It seems so long ago. We even got the local librarian to notarize an affadavit of domestic partnership so that Wabash would extend benefits to me. It was like spotlighting a deer, handing it a piece of paper and saying, "Sign here please."

So now we're calling this our "Peace Corps Indiana" experience and heading out west to Denver/Boulder. I'll be at the government publications library at CU-Boulder and we'll live in Denver to start out. We'll be out there in a couple weeks and look forward to the mountains and to being in a city where we can walk to the public library, coffee shops, light rail...

I started knitting a few years ago when a friend got breast cancer and I wanted to make something for her. So I knitted a purple hat. Then friends were having babies and I started in on baby blankets, sweaters and hats. I finally knitted an adult sweater for Matt last year, which turned out really well. My latest project, which I just finished a couple days ago is a set of six placemats knitted from four colors. I found the pattern in a book Matt's mother gave me called Knitting Year-Round, published by Better Homes and Gardens.