Pincushion challenge

Last night I finished my pincushion for the September pincushion challenge. I used the wee bunny pattern from wee wonderfuls. I shrunk the pattern to %50 of the original size and used a few loops of ribbon sewn into the seam for a tail instead of a pompom. The fabric is leftovers from a purse that I made, the ribbon is left over from curtains that I made and it's stuffed with leftover quilt batting scraps. It turned out alright, although it doesn't sit as flat as I would like. I think it may make a better cat toy than pincushion :/

Completed project: wristlet purse

This weekend I finished a wristlet purse. I used this tutorial from craftster as a starting point. I really wanted to use just a single retangle of the outer fabric and a single rectangle of the inner fabric, rather than 4 rectangles as was shown in the tutorial. Although I have never tried it, lining up stripes on 2 pieces of fabric looks tricky and it's something I want to avoid. I also lined it with some fusible fleece interfacing to help it keep it's shape. I kind of botched the topstitching around the zipper, that part really should've been done differently. If I was to do this again, I would use one large rectangles of outer fabric and 2 small rectangles of inner fabric. This would allow me to topstitch along the zipper before I sewed the side seams. But other than that I'm very happy with how it turned out. The finished size is about 9 inches by 5 inches with a 10 inch strap.

September Whiplash: hat

Materials:

• three skeins of Blue Sky Alpaca 100% alpaca yarn
• size US 8 12" circular needle
• size US 8 double pointed needles
• cable needle

This project encompasses a lot of firsts for me. This is the first thing I've knit for my husband, my first try at knitting cables, and it's also my first experience with alpaca yarn. The expert at my neighborhood yarn store said that alpaca is actually warmer than wool, plus it is much softer and less itchy than wool, making it the perfect choice for a Minnesota winter hat. I modified this chunky cabled hat pattern to be knit with two strands of Blue Sky Alpaca yarn on size US 8 needles. I started with 2 inches of K2P2 for the cuff and added 2 iterations of the cable pattern (for a total of 88 stitches) to make the hat large enough.

The pattern knit up super quick with the circular needles. I really recommend using circular needles for hats until you need to start decreasing at the top of the hat - sometimes when I use DPN I can tell where the knitting was separated on to different needles because those stitches are a little wider than their neighbors.

This project is an entry in the skill category of the September whiplash.