Birthday

It's been snowing since we returned from Greece! Goodness! Whatever happened to spring?

Part of BFF's birthday present (Greece being the big one) was knitting a hat he'd requested for the last 3 months. It wasn't an ordinary hat, no no; it was this particular beauty that he wanted, ever since we watched some biathlon event on tv and a German athlete whizzed by wearing a purple hat with an embroidered Milka logo.

"I want one of those," were his precise words. "Sure," I replied. It took a serendipitous trip to a nearby yarn store that was closing to get the yarn; an almost accurate match in color. I had some leftover cream-colored yarn so I decided to use them together, even though the purple yarn was a cotton mix and the cream yarn was a wool mix. (BFF won't know!) I had to explain to him that in knitting, each letter is made of v-shaped stitches; there was no way I was going to embroider this over knitting.

So.

You'll notice my knitting says "Soy..." Well, I did indeed chart the word "Milka" in script style and showed it to BFF, who approved it. But when it came time to actually knitting it, he changed his mind. "How about Soya?" he asked, so out came the pen and grid paper (actually, I did it in Adobe Illustrator). A few minutes later I had a new chart, and I actually had him pencil his signature on a piece of paper to approve it. (Clients. You know, get them to sign off on a project before they change their mind. You'll save a lot of trouble on your part later on.)

This is the back of my intarsia. It took me a few days to figure out how I was going to do it. Should I strand the yarn all over the hat? Should I cut 4 long strands of yarn and use one for each letter? In the end, I used one strand and knit with it across every row. On odd rows I worked the yarn from right to left. On even rows, I left a long loop of yarn and knit with this loop, then pulled the excess yarn through the stitches. As well, to avoid having a visible tension between side stitches on each row, I anchored the working yarn two stitches from the intarsia. This technique is by no means original; Rick Mondragon (the current editor of Knitting Magazine) first documented it. A better explanation of this technique is blogged about here.

Pardon the lighting, I knit the hat while in Greece and didn't have time for props and proper lighting and blah blah blah. I'm about to join the lining and hat stitches together. Don't be like me and put the lining stitches on needles and attempt to fold them into the hat. First fold the lining in, then undo the provisional cast-on 4-8 stitches at a time. I poked quite a few holes in the hat using my dummy method!

Here's the finished birthday hat on my birthday boy! He wore the hat all throughout the rest of our stay in Greece, and he received many compliments, from climbers, on it. Now he wants a hat that says "@$!*#&". Oh shitsky, what have I started?