The Iditarod (the famous 1,000 mile Alaskan dog sled race) and its knit-a-long companion, the Iknitarod, are long over now and are well past yesterday’s news. But it’s what I think of whenever I catch sight of this cute, silly hat I created during those events. It always makes me smile, even if I do know the disproportional amount of work that went into making such a small, utilitarian thing, and all it’s various hand spun yarns. I’m especially pleased with the dog that’s knit with Chiengora. Yes, that’s right: I knit the dog on the hat with yarn that I spun from the fur of my dog. The original pattern for this hat did not have a dog. However, I’m not the first person to think it’s a good idea to stage a herding dog among this flock of sheep. Meg Warren did it, and published her version as a separate pattern on Ravelry. Her dogs, however, are very clearly border collies, and well -I wanted the dog in my version of the hat to look like MY dog, a Cardigan Corgi. My thinking was that learning the colorwork technique was enough to manage at one time, without worrying about the pattern, too. I subsequently decided to re-chart the entire pattern for this hat, so I wouldn’t have to think about it while I was knitting. It took me a surprisingly long time to make a digital version of the pattern that was in my head, and creating it on a computer was its own learning process. Here’s how it turned out:
Now I’m working on the accompanying mitts, and as soon as I look up Elizabeth Zimmerman’s method of casting off by casting on, this first one is going to be finished. Here’s ripping out, last week:
Both mitts really should be finished by now, but with things being what they were last week, the mitts were set aside for several days and I made a lot of progress on swatching, instead. My new pattern is nearly done, and then it will be on to knitting a real sample of it. In the meantime, here’s a teaser:
