The Knitting Fiend

Ellie Glabu sent a photo of a hat she designed using my double flap hat pattern generator, following directions for the “pointy top” option.¹

Mind you, she used the calculator to compute a generic pattern, and then made quite a few changes. (This explains why her hat is cuter than the one I knit. Why is it my readers always improve on my stuff?! )

Here’s her explanation of what she did:

I made one major change of my own. It was something I saw on knitty.com.

I first knitted a strip of patterned cable about 21″ long, I sewed it in a circle, then I picked up stitches around the bottom and constructed the earflaps, then picked up stitches along the top and knitted the crown (I opted for a pointy top)

As a Christmas present to myself I bought some Dog hair yarn from VIP fibers. Your calculator really helped out since I was using such an odd type of hand spun yarn.
I even impressed myself with how well this came out!

So, really, she used the calculator to calculate shaping directions for the crown and the flaps, but replaced the straight unshaped part. Now, that’s a clever: Use computers to do the math. Insert your own creativity!

I bet that hat will keep her ears warm all winter!

First, thank you to anyone and everyone who helped get me on the ballot in Queer Joe’s Best Knitting Blog Awards Contest.

Second, voting has begun. This is the fun part. In fact, the most fun will be had by reading the ballots and clicking the links to the blogs that were nominated. Of course you’ll find many of the blogs everyone’s heard of and loves, like “Carieoke Knits”, “Crazy Aunt Purl”, “The Yarn Harlot”, “Wendy Knits”, “String or Nothing” and Jen La”.

I also saw blogs I think only a few people have heard off — particularly in the “Best New Blog” and “Best Technical Blog” categories. I saw “DivaKnitting”, which is wonderful, but newer, so still not heavily linked. I’d never visited “KnitterGuy”, which is hardly surprising since it appears to be a 3 month old blog; I just checked out “Glitty Knitty Kitty” who, like me, has recently been making socks. Obviously, some people love “Blue Stocking”, but it took Joe’s contest for me to learn of it!

I promise there will be blogs you want to discover on the ballots — and even more below the ballots. Joe listed every blog that recieved at least one nomination. I’ll be exploring them all over the next few days.

If you’re curious, check them all out. While you are there, vote!

Hundred Meter Socks: Cuff Down.

Yes, another sock-u-lator; this if for the people who want to knit ribbed socks cuff down, some toe up. If you'd like to knit them toe up, use Sock-u-lator III .

It occurred to me that some of you may wonder why I always have a "more" tag on days when calculators are announced? It's because, for some reason, the calculators don't calculate unless these show as "single" entries. So, if you are at the main page, click more. (If you aren't it won't show, so you can just be puzzled about this mysterious paragraph!)