I designed a bamboo motif for the double-knit scarf—appropriate, since the yarn is made of 100% bamboo. I have seven pages of charts altogether (all 460 rows), which means I have to pay attention to each row.

With the double-knitting, it can get a smidge confusing which color to use, but it looks like I haven’t messed up yet! Knock on wood for me! I’m going for the gold!

Don’t you just love those clever folks over at Ravelry? They’ve come up with the 2008 Ravelympics, a sort of knitting olympics, where the goal is to cast on and finish a project during the 17 days of the Summer Olympics.

As a proud Angeleno, I am playing for Team LaLa Land in the event “Designers Discus.” My plan is to make a double-knit scarf out of some stash Rowan Bamboo Soft yarn I’ve had lying around for about a year. I’m not allowed to cast on until the opening ceremonies, but swatching is considered “training,” so here are my swatches:

I created the charts for the colorwork tonight and I’m starting to wonder if I’m biting off more than I can chew. The chart is 34 stitches wide and 460 rows long, and each row has a colorwork pattern to follow. Gulp.

Check back soon to see if I survive, or if I drop out with a pulled hamstring. (Or, more likely, tendonitis in my wrist!)

I try not to blog from work because, well, it’s just a little too obvious when my posts appear between 9am and 6pm. But I guess I’m letting my guard down. If my boss sees this, I suppose she’ll just have to find something for me to work on.

For now, I wanted to unveil a secret project: Sky Birds!

I made this hat as a special order for my brother’s birthday. He wanted a super-warm, machine washable hat to keep him warm in the wilderness. My brother is a wildlife biologist who has a soft spot for raptors. He spends most of his days getting paid to count and identify hawks and falcons and eagles that fly over his head. His body and, thus, head is often in cold, remote places and needs adequate warmth. And since he’s a mountain man, he can’t mess with fussy fibers that require flat-drying. The birds don’t wait for flat-drying. He takes some really awesome pictures of said birds. Case in point:

(Photo by Jeff. All rights reserved and whatnot.)

It took me a while to come up with the design for the hat. I knew I wanted it to have birds in silhouette, but coming up with the right number of birds in the right shape was harder than expected. I realized that to acheive the warmth Jeff wanted, I should double-knit the hat. Of course, the benefit of doing so is that the hat is then reversible.

I then ordered some Swish DK in Coal and Skyborne (perfect color name, I couldn’t pass it up). (The Swish is such a soft superwash wool, I would definitely recommend it for other projects.) I then charted the project to the right gauge and figured out the length of the hat and how the decreases should be spaced. Anyway, I thought I had patterned the pattern perfectly, until it came out just a smidge too short. Ripping out the double-knitting was out of the question, so the easiest answer was to add earflaps. I had to pick up stitches while maintaining the double-knit fabric, which required more brain-power than usual. Spatial reasoning is not my strongest suit. But the mental gymnastics paid off and the earflaps look almost seamless.

Two more pics:

(Excuse the extra fluff on the hat. I hadn’t washed it yet, and black yarn just picks up all the stray fibers—whether woolen or feline—that linger around the house.)

And the happy customer:

I’ve been told his fellow birders are insanely jealous of the hat and have put in orders for their own Sky Birds, but for now, Jeff’s is one of a kind.