before christmas, i tried to make the brioche hat in Weekend Knitting for my sweetie at least 15 times before i gave up. my biggest problem was that after doing the two color cast-on, the stitches didn't really have a defined bottom, so almost every time i joined to make the hat in the round, i twisted it. and then i couldn't tell for a few rows, so it was really annoying. and the couple times i managed to join it without twisting, i didn't end up with the right number of stiches. so i gave up and made things for everyone else except my wonderful husband. what a mean bitch of a wife i am.

i should have known from the description at the beginning of the pattern, "a lot of serious knitters believed it couldn't be done - that is, brioche stitch in the round," that i was way too bad of a knitter to be able to make this. but i am stubborn. and bryan made me feel guilty for not making it for him. so, for his birthday this past monday, i tried to make it again. i figured out a trick to help me join - i cast on with the two colors in the hat and also held a different color yarn underneath those two so that i could tell where the bottom was. but then when i switched to bigger needles after 3 inches i screwed something up and i couldn't figure out how to fix it because brioche stitch is complicated and i am dumb. so i had to rip it all out.



i almost decided that bryan would get this hat when he was as old as the salty old man in the picture in the pattern, who for some reason makes me think of a sailor and the ocean.



but i perservered, and i managed to finish the hat two days after his birthday with only one side of the decreases looking asstastic. but i'm pretty sure i could make another hat witout making any mistakes now that i know how it works.



let's look at a closeup of this gorgeous hat!



another present i gave bryan was a very strange little cat on a crocheted doily that i bought from a crazy person on telegraph. it looks dead. i put it in the hamster cage and lady avalache attacked it.



and last saturday we made dinner with erin because we wanted to go to pasta pomodoro at 10:45 when they closed at 11, but then they closed early so we missed our yummy dinner. and we had to make dinner instead so we ate at 1 am. but it was yummy. we had four cheese pasta with tomato and basil made from a recipe from America's Test kitchen. we also made mashed sweet potatoes and steamed broccoli with a basil vinagrette from the america's test kitchen book that heather gave bryan for christmas. bryan looooooooves america's test kitchen. mwah mwah, richard kimble!

dave is very happy with his hat. although i was crushed by his decision to join another lab. poor me. here is a picture of him that doesn't show the hat very well.



today i let the cats go outside and enjoy the jungle grass in our front yard. they had lots of fun. see, this is why i don't mow my lawn.





and i found a way to get even with the really mean hamster who likes my blood (lady avalanche) - hamster torture. if i lodge a chew biscuit (hard thing that feels like it's made of coral or something, but is supposed to help them grind their teeth down and have some nutritional value) in the bars of the cage, she'll chew it like a crazy possessed demon hamster until she either can pull it through or it falls down to the floor. if i just open the cage and give her one, she runs off and puts it in the food stash tube area of the hamster paradise. which is where she goes to deposit the chewed up biscuit that she stores in her cheek puches once she gets it out of the cage bars. yick. crazy rodents.

it's been hat mania for me lately. i love making hats. on monday during stitching bitches i made one for my friend Dave (who might join my lab, i hope i hope i hope) in the brightest baby blue-sky blue cotton yarn ever.



first i made a gauge swatch in the shape of a hat only to discover it was ginormous. whoops. so then i made it again, and it fits my head, which is about the same size as Dave's - giant. i hope he likes it (i warned him it was crazy bright).



here is Hunter wearing the seaman's cap i made him out of Elsebeth Lavold angora (and trying to do a James Dean impression (and i should mention this is the smartest person in my graduate class - he is about to graduate (less than 4 years after we started (bastard)))). he likes it.

i am also making two other hats that i screwed up on a bunch but now i have them figured out (i think). i need to take pictures of their little hat beginnings.



in non-hat related knitting, i bought some cotton yarn to make my mom (don't click this, mom) this for mother's day. the color didn't come out that great in the picture, but it is a nice soft light green.


and i know everyone hates pictures of people's cats, but bryan took this one yesterday and i like it lots. and it shows all the work i did painting the tiles in our bathroom.

i stayed up all night last wednesday thinking that i could finish my clapotis, and i finished knitting all the yarn i had. but this is what i was left with:



urrggh. yes, a 98% finished clapotis. and since i hand-dyed the yarn, that means i have to order more andean silk from knitpicks and try and dye about 10 more yards the same approximate colors. i was considering just finishing it with lambs pride bulky in purple just to show it who's the boss, but i decided against that.

the reason i ran out is that heather and i are lazy estimators - each skein of the yarn in the pattern (for rich people) is 100g and has 205 yards - the andean silk has 97 yards in a 50g ball, which is about half, so we decided 6 skeins of andean silk was equal to 3 skeins of lorna's laces lion and lamb. uh, no. the 33 yard difference plus the fact that my gauge was slightly off meant that i had to do fewer of the straight section repeats, which i figured out early enough, but then i was greedy and tried to squeeze out 9 repeats instead of 8. bad, bad, greedy knitter. the kittens are disgusted.



in happier knitting news, a hat i made for christmas for bryan's boss's son is now one of his favorite things (he wouldn't even put it on when i gave it to him). he refused to go to sleep the other night until he had it in his crib with him. his dad left me a very cute picture of him wearing it recently on my desk in an envelope marked "for your blog". he is the cutest little boy ever.

i'm back from san diego now, but didn't get a chance to post this picture while i was there. i cast on for clapotis last week with the yarn i dyed when i was visiting heather. i like how it knits up, and i am constantly amazed by the fact that i made it, not that it was hard, but i'm still impressed with myself. han insisted on taking pictures of me in my pyjamas with the clap progress, and i was too tired to argue.



i hope to be done pretty soon, so i will post a more close-up picture then. and i didn't realize how crazy all the fabric was in the hotel room. maybe that's why i had all those dreams about big flowers trying to eat me.