Deep Breath

Okay, I give up. Elizabeth I has kicked my ass. The pattern is great and I'm sure it's beautiful but that Alpaca Cloud is just TOO thin for me. I don't have enough lace experience to use that fine a yarn. My big fat fingers can't manipulate it into anything more than a mess. I want to do it. In fact, I have a bit of a stomach ache now that I've realized that I'm not going to be able to do it without doing a few other lace projects first. I don't have time to do a couple of practice projects! Look at my side bar! AAAAAARGH! Deep breath. On the brighter side of knitting, I finished knitting the Princess Leia hat. I got the pattern from a website that has a bunch of chemo-cap patterns, the one I used is called the Amelia Earhart Aviator Cap. The pattern calls for worsted weight or DK weight yarn and size 8 needles so I just went to sport weight and used size 6 needles. It worked like a charm! The hat is very stretchy and fits my 16 month old as well as my 3 year old. For average sized kids I'd say it'd fit a 1 1/2 to a 4 year old. I've finished the buns as well. I braided the yarn instead of doing I-cord like someone had suggested. Cutting that many lengths of yarn was almost as much work as the I-cord but I managed. I constructed the buns like a braided rug so I could make sure they'd stay together. All that's left is to put them on the hat. That may prove to be the most difficult task as I have to figure out how they need to be positioned which requires putting the hat on the baby and messing with it. She doesn't like when you mess with her head. Oh yeah, other specs on the hat: I used Andean Treasure in Woods. I highly recommend this yarn for this hat as it looks beautiful and is SUPER SOFT. It took less than one skein to do the hat and about 3/4 of a skein to do the braids. I had no idea how much it was going to take so I had ordered four skeins so now I have two+ leftover skeins sitting around. Hmmmm. What to so with that beautiful alpaca? I'm thinking of being good and sweet and making two more hats like this for actual child cancer patients. The alpaca is so soft that I'm sure it'd make a good chemo cap. The only thing is that it's brown. What sick kid wants a brown hat? So now there's guilt involved. Ug. Maybe I should order some more alpaca in pretty kid-friendly colors and make hats. No, I'm broke, can't do that. Plus look at the side bar, EEK! No, don't look at the side bar, never look at the side bar! Deep breath. As you can see from the pictures I finished the hat before I finished this post. Red Todd Kidd took over the computer last night so I just saved this as a draft. As soon as I finished the hat this afternoon I knew I HAD to get the pictures up. TOO CUTE! I'm so proud of this project! Yea me!