Double the Cuteness

The first set of baby boy cuteness is done! Followed closely by a large dose of baby girl cuteness.

I finished this hat in about two days. I think my knitting is getting a lot faster. It's basically the same as the blue hat except it has this cool braided thing on the top and bottom of the snowflake pattern and I embroidered little french knots and additional snowflakes to tie it all together. It has a tiny little purple 'sprig' at the top but hard to see in this photo.

Then of course the booties needed a little bit of something to tie them to the hat.  It's a lot more pink than I anticipated but how can you go wrong with pink and baby girls?

I thought the boy's hat needed a little something more, so I added a braided tassel. Very easy to do this.

Just cut some lengths of yarn about 14" long and with a yarn needle, pull each color through the top so that the yarn is folded in half. Usually there are about 6 or 7 stitches at the very top of a hat where the last stitches were pulled together. I secure each color of the tassel yarns through 2-3 of these top stitches.

Here I cut 3 lengths of 3 colors. Neatly braid the three colors about 1.5 inches longer than where you want the knot to be.

Make an overhand knot at the end of the braided section so that the knot itself is made up of the braided yarns. Snug that knot down to where you want it.

Trim the ends to desired length.

In other news, I had fun with the ladies at the Knit World knitting group yesterday. There was a new woman from Egypt, just learning to knit and a hearing impaired woman whom I stuck up a short notepad conversation with. A lovely older lady named Pauline has knitted for years but never on DPN's so I'm going to show her how next week. I showed everyone my booties and hat and it was nice to get some feedback. Lots of oooohs and ahhhhs and howcutes.

I think in general -- from my observations -- most New Zealand knitters seem to knit from patterns and on straight needles. I think I'm the only one I've seen so far using DPN's. And of course I like to make things up. There is something to say for following a pattern though...you don't have to think too much about what you're doing and it all comes out wonderfully. It's just interesting to note that I've gotten to the point where I can make modifications. It wasn't too many years ago that I didn't know much past knit and purl. 

Now the inevitable lull that comes after finishing a project and wondering what will I do next? Seems I can't let too much time go by without the needles in hand.