A Naturally Completed Cable Beanie & More Knitting

Hey everybody! Today is January the 9^th aka Monday! Hope you’re braving the winter safely… and if you live in a place that’s actually warm I am super envious of you right now.

It’s been freezing cold, which means I haven’t been out and about as much because the roads got a bit frozen. Remember Friday’s blog where I was joking about knitting in the big freeze? Yeah we actually did get quite a bit of a freeze. 15 degrees Fahrenheit… Sheesh, I live down South USA too so this was kind of unexpected almost. Despite that the cold actually sped up my knitting to the point I actually have a new finished object! I casted this on during Christmas Eve and I’ve been knitting it for the past couple of weeks… Can you guess what it is? It’s blue. It’s a really nice blue.

It’s my Cable Beanie! Yes I finished this off a night ago and I can safely say I am super proud of myself. This is my second hat project, and my second cable project. The pattern is called The Natural by SplendorKnitting (Homera Luna). I really love how the rib twists into the cable it makes for such an awesome design. The pattern itself is actually quite easy and I recommend it to any beginner knitter who wants to get into cable. I mean I’m a beginner knitter as well; I started knitting for the first time back in September. I’m also very new to cable and my first cable project was this Waffle Owl cloth I made for Mum for Christmas.

I learned a lot of stuff from this project, such as the fact you don’t need to do cable every row and on this pattern there’s actually a 15 row gap between cables. It’s definitely not brain surgery like I first thought it was. Maybe it would be called knitting surgery given the nature of it, haha. It’s actually kind of mysterious as to how it works.. All you’re doing is twisting stitches over stitches to create these awesome shapes. This cable is actually kind of basic compared to some really insane cables I’ve seen. I’m a man who likes a challenge though, so you can be sure I will be tackling the highest mountain of cable knitting in the future to come.

Of course on this hat I used size US 7 Circular Hat needles but later on when I was making the crown I actually had to switch to US 7s with a longer cord due to it getting a bit tight. The yarn I used was Lana Grossa Lord yarn, which is actually discontinued now so this hat is kind of a special hat made with rare one of a kind yarn. I still think this yarn should be classed as Aran Weight not Worsted but alas it is worsted, heavy worsted anyway. The yarn feels really nice in this hat though and it makes for a warm thick beanie.

This hat is going to be featured in my new upcoming ZAKKnits Episode I’m currently editing. I’m going to be showing off how I did the cable sections of my cable beanie so stay tuned it’s coming soon!

Cable knitting has definitely become a favorite of mine, next to color works and lace… and pretty much every other form of knitting except for casting on. Yes I love pretty much all aspects of knitting but casting on always seems to be a sticky point for me. For one my cable hat has a bit of a loose cast on, I don’t know if you can see it in the photo or not. It’s not too much of an issue it doesn’t slide around on my head and fits like an ACTUAL beanie compared to my previous hat project which ended up being too big. Though with some advice from Mum I’ve been practicing my cast on to try and actually tighten it up. I didn’t really know why my casting on suddenly got so loose but I think it was because I was purposely untwisting my stitches while I was casting on… Yeah it was human error alright but I’ve been doing some casting on training in the Dojo of Knitting. (Which may or may not be our living room.) One must tread carefully while in the Dojo of Knitting and safety equipment is a must… I was wearing my new cable beanie so I was safe. Also be wary of yarn strands and dropped stitch markers. Hopefully no dropped stitches, haha.

Anyway I think I’m improving and hopefully future hat projects will not have such sloppy cast ons. This may actually be why my first hat was a bit sloppy too. The cast on I use most of the time is a normal cast on which consists of knitting like normal but putting the stitch onto your right needle instead of onto your next needle like you will do after you cast on.

My cable hat wasn’t the only project I’ve been working on over this freeze…  Mum has assigned me a new mission… A dishcloth mission. Yes! I’m going back to my roots and making a new dishcloth. This time I’m using my own custom pattern.

Not sure how well you can see the pattern on this photo, white dishcloths do not get picked up that easily on cameras apparently. The dishcloth is basically just the result of me messing around with some stitches that I thought would look cool. There’s only two kinds of stitches I’ve used on this dishcloth and only two, Knit and Purl. Yup just simple knits and purls is all it took to create this sort of zig zag pattern. Actually it kind looks like mountains. I’m actually planning on putting this pattern up for free here on the blog and on Ravelry for you to download! I really want to become a knitting pattern designer and make my own patterns so maybe this could be my first step into that. It’s nothing too crazy it’s a simple dishcloth with some purls and knits but it’ll be a fun free pattern I think (Especially for beginners). Hopefully I can learn to write good and easy to understand patterns with your feedback. (Feedback will be a must on these patterns.) So yeah that’s a vision of mine and I’m going to make it come true and take my first step into making knitting patterns for you all to try out.

So yeah that’s it on knitting for now. I need to start up some new projects; my knitting bag is looking a little empty but no worries! There are tons of knitting projects I’ve not even attempted yet. I’m really enjoying knitting and it’s been a crazy awesome journey for me and this blog. You guys too, I know a few of you have been following me for a bit now. You guys are awesome so hope you’re enjoying the blog and my knitting journey.

Putting down the needles now; It’s still pretty cold and keeps dropping below freezing every so often so to warm us all up we’ve been having some yummy hot meals the past couple of days. We had some amazing hot, spicy but also sweet at the same time Chili!

The best way to warm up is to eat some of Mum’s homemade yummy Chili. It was the perfect meal for how cold it was.

It’s time for another Re Growing a Lettuce Challenge update! If you don’t know what this is, last Monday Mum came up with this crazy idea of, well, re-growing a lettuce! We put this lettuce stem into a shot glass of water and well… It’s actually working. 

Yes it’s growing at a pretty nice pace. Even during the cold weather this Lettuce is trucking through. I had no idea you could re-grow a lettuce so easily like this. Are there any other veggies you can grow like this? Anyway it’s been a whole week now. Check out last Wednesday and Friday’s blog to see the first parts of the progress!

Finally I’ve been playing Pokemon Sun, like a lot and well… I beat the Pokemon League. Yup after a pretty difficult Elite Four I triumphed over the Pokemon League and became Alola’s Champion. There’s actually quite a lot to do after the main story is over and might I add the story of this game was really beautiful. This game probably has my favorite story out of all previous Pokemon games. Despite a couple of flaws these games are actually becoming my favorite Pokemon games to date, beating out Gold and Silver. I am now training up some Pokemon for the Battle Tree, Battle Royale and Online Battles. So yeah if you want to battle at some point just message me on Social Media or comment below and I’ll see if I can get a time put together for us to battle! Or trade if you want. Don’t have a full blown competitive team built up yet (Working on it.) but my in game team is pretty awesome too.

I also started up Pokemon Moon and of course I picked Litten in contrast to me picking Popplio on Sun (I actually got a Rowlet through Wonder Trade… Who knew.) but I ran into one pretty sticky issue. So on Route 1 there’s this Beauty Trainer called Krystal and she has this Gastly. I don’t know if this was the same on Sun but I had a Munchlax out (THE MUNCHLAX EVENT ENDS TODAY BY THE WAY!! I don’t know if he’s still up or not but hurry up if you haven’t got him yet.) This was kind of user fault I guess in a way but I decided to try to take out the Gastly using Metronome… Well that didn’t work whatsoever and the Gastly used Mean Look. 

You see Gastly is a ghost type… And my Munchlax is a normal type with nothing that can touch ghost Pokemon except for Metronome, which ran out of PP. WELL I got stuck in an infinite loop battle where neither Pokemon could do anything and I couldn’t switch out due to Mean look. This went on forever to the point I soft resetted my game (Which due to not saving for a bit I got put back quite a lot on my progress, oops on my part.). This is just a little warning for those playing Sun and Moon. DO NOT BATTLE THE BEAUTY/BLONDE HAIR TRAINER ON ROUTE 2 unless you have a Pokemon in the front of your party that can actually do damage to a Gastly. The lesson here is… Save your game more often, as often as you can. With that little goof up out of the way I managed to catch back up on Moon. I want to start playing Moon more often now that I’ve beaten Sun. There are a lot of awesome version exclusives in Moon such as Super Cool Dragon Granddad but we just call him Drampa for short.

That pretty much wraps up the blog for today. My hands aren’t tired from knitting yet so I’m going to pick back up my needles and get working. Hope you’re enjoying your day! Hope you got your knitted items out and are keeping warm. Once again if you actually live in a warm area… I’m super jealous of you. Doesn’t seem to matter what I do my feet will not warm up, help.

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See you on Wednesday!