Christmas knitting

Hope all your Christmas knitting got done in time, and that their recipients are enjoying them!  

Knitting For Me came to a halt as the idea to knit hats entered my mind, oh, somewhere around October.  I vastly exagerrated my knitting prowess and decided that I could knit 30 hats in 30 days.  I scoured the Internets and Ravelry and had an entire army of patterns lined up in my mind and on my shelf.  The dream faded quickly as it took me five days to knit the first hat (Stella's).

I plugged onwards, to see just how many hats I could churn out in a month's time.  Next up: Urchin.  I'd been saving up a skein of thick-'n-thin(ner than usual) Malabrigo in a lovely teal color -- purchased two (three?) Thanksgivings ago at Imagiknit in San Francisco (how and why do I remember these things?) -- for something special, and it turned out just how I'd imagined:  lovely!

[urchin -- to keep or to give?]

I frogged and made some mods, so Urchin, too, took me nearly a week to complete.

Then it was on to a simple hat in a purple yarn my parents had acquired for me.  I wanted to use up as much of it as possible so there was some frogging involved here, too, as I went back and forth with the when and how much of crown increases and decreases.  Another week gone by...

[three weeks = three hats... (x_x)]

I hadn't intended on knitting the Turn A Square hat, but in a quick moment pulled out a skein of Noro Kureyon and some leftover Patons Classic Merino.  It only took one day to knit one, and in a fraction of the time it took to knit the above, I had four hats!  If only I'd started with this pattern!

Some modifications were made: decreasing the number of stitches cast on, elminating the additional stitches made after the ribbing, knitting 2x2 instead of 2x3 stripe pattern.  I used the entire skein of Kureyon in three hats and knit up the leftover solids (pea green, olive, gray) into a fourth.

[four squared]

It was an awesome stashbusting experience!  Another cool tidbit:  the grey came from the leftovers of my Forecast sweater -- whose buttonband was reknit ages ago but never blogged -- which I've been wearing practically nonstop the entire season.  It now looks like this:

[finally finished forecast]

So: seven hats total (one claimed by DC, two by *ahem* moi-meme!).  A lot less than I'd aimed for, but, on the flipside, a bit of a head-start into next year's gift giving.  Now: back to KFM!