One Hundred Hats

Hat Knitting Club

I spend a good amount of time on Ravelry each day, looking at hat patterns, choosing hat patterns to go with the yarn I have, and deciding just which hat patterns I want to knit for the One Hundred Hats project. A week or so ago, I counted all the hat patterns I had marked in my Ravelry account as "maybe to knit", and it totaled more than 300.

Three Hundred.

I am trying to knit one hundred hats for charity, and am almost halfway through, so why did I need THREE HUNDRED hat patterns queued up? It seemed pretty ridiculous, so I cleared them all out in one fell swoop, and decided to create my very own Hat Club!

 

{I totally ripped this idea off from the Yarn Harlot, lest anyone think I'm this brilliant on my own.} Much like a sock club you can sign up for, I will be able to reach into the drawer and pull out a mystery hat/yarn combo and knit my way quickly through the remaining 50 hats towards my goal!

I spent a good amount of time on Saturday looking up hat patterns that went with the yarns I had on hand, thanks in large part to very generous donations. As I found a pattern that went with the yarn in my hand, I wrote it down on a piece of paper (including needle size and any extras I may need) and stashed it in a Ziploc bag, and then moved on to the next skein of yarn.

When I'd made it through all the yarn in my "wool drawer", this is what I had left {photo above}. Enough yarn pared up with hat patterns to last me until around hat #80. I did a little dance, happy that for the next thirty hats or so, all I'll have to do is grab a bag out of the drawer, grab the needles listed, and start knitting! What a great way to get almost completely done with the project, I said to myself!

On Sunday, I discovered this:

 
I KNEW I was missing some of the donated yarn somewhere!

So now i've got a few more skeins of yarn to sort through and pair up with patterns, and I'm betting by the time I've got that done, I'll have more than enough yarn for the remaining hats I'll need to knit by the end of August. 

Making The Transition: Why The Switch Away From Wordpress?

Last weekend I performed a minor feat – I switched the blog platform for One Hundred Hats from Wordpress over to Typepad. To many people, one blogging platform is as good as the next, and while I was able to pull it all off with minimal hassle {and hopefully without losing any followers!}, I thought I’d answer the WHY.

I cut my blogging teeth on Typepad several years ago, with a blog that no longer exists. And I find that, no matter where I may stray, I always seem to come back to blogging with them. I’m not super well versed in CSS and have no experience with PHP, and so tweaking a blog design in Wordpress is next to impossible for me.

And while I enjoyed the design I had going, I knew it could be better, and I also knew that short of paying someone a lot of money, I wasn’t going to be able to make it a lot better.

With Typepad, there is a feature that allows you to customize your blog in amazing ways, all without needing to know a lick of CSS or PHP. I was able to add up a super sweet banner, keep all the colors exactly where I wanted, have the columns spaced how I like, and so much more.

All these design details may not matter to you, oh faithful followers who have been with me from the very first hat I cast on. But for new peeps popping on over for the 50th Hat Celebration {more news coming soon!}, hearing about what’s going on as I work ever closer to my goal, I wanted to have a space that was as warm and welcoming as I could possibly make it.

So that meant change.

I’m planning to stick with what I’ve got {blogging platform-wise} for the foreseeable future – the goal is to take One Hundred Hats far beyond the first goal, and I’m confident that Typepad can help me do that.

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Whew!

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get back to hats! I’ll have some pretty yarn pictures for you later today!

Crafty Goodness

Welcome to this week's Crafty Goodness - my weekly round-up of all the fun crafty bits I find from around the internet.

** Sashiko pillow gorgeousness, courtesy of Grumperina!

** Looking for advice on how to add some flair to your work wardrobe? Search no further than Gala Darling.

** Remove acrylic paint from your clothing with this great tutorial.

** Adorable DIY valentines.

** Shaklee h2 review.

** - Gorgeous pattern for a crochet blanket - if you can get past some of the fabulous 70's stuff!

** Ribbon bound blank books!

**  sock knitting class online with Afghans for Afghans

**  gorgeous rubber doily!

** Vintage valentine’s day card love.

** Arctic blast mitts

** Free downloadable February calendar.

** Hot pepper wrist warmers.

**  Crochet chain garland!

** Say I love you with post-its.

**  I'm in love with these adorable baby shower invitations!

** Win a tutu for valentine’s day!

** Five great knitted valentine’s day gifts from Vickie Howell. 

**  Never underestimate the power of an inspiration board.

Dapperly Dashing (#41)

It seemed so warm and sunny this morning, and I was super excited to take photos of the Dapperly Dashing hat (#41), and then it started to snow. Big, giant flakes of snow that weren't supposed to accumulte but have managed to leave a 1/2" of slush and yuck everywhere, defying the weather people's predictions.

So I was understandably non-excited to be outside taking this picture:

 

Dapperly Dashing is a pattern that includes a matching scarf, and if I had some thicker yarn and a bit more time on my hands, I'd have knit both up, As it is, I knit this hat using a 1/2 skein of Patons wool I had leftover from making the Rain Down hat (#35), knitting away on the pattern until I all but ran out of yarn.

It turns out that, while the pattern calls for worsted weight yarn and a size 8 needle, I would have been better to use a bit thicker worsted yarn than Patons, or sized up to 9's. The hat is just a bit snug on my head, thanks to all the p2tog that happen over the course of the thing. It's not so tight that it won't stretch out, or can't be worn by someone with a slightly smaller head than I, but as the pattern is meant for an adult male, I'm guessing my gauge was a bit off.

But how often do I worry about gauge? NEVER.

Specs:

Dapperly Dashing pattern by Stormy Tetreault, available as a free Ravelry download; size 8 bamboo 16" circs used, along with 1/2 skein of Patons wool in olive.
 

Ravelympics 2010

The Winter Olympics are set to start on February 12th, and with the opening ceremonies begins a tradition carried out on Ravelry for the past several years – the Ravelympics! Created as a fun way to combine knitting with sport, the Ravelympics hosts events (like WIP Wrestling, Sock Hockey and Hat Halfpipe), thousands of Ravelry knitters and crocheters are signing up for teams and gearing up for the festivities.

Because I’m participating this year – in the Hat Halfpipe of course – I thought I’d give a quick profile here, as my participation will affect this blog in a few small ways. But first, a few starter questions:

How Do I Sign Up? To sign up for the Ravelympics, you have to first be a member of Ravelry. Then, simply join the Ravelympics 2010 group and find a team that suits you. Teams for different cities and states abound, as well as national teams (Team UK tends to rock) and teams based around podcasts and yarn types.

How Many Teams Can I Be Part Of? You can be part of as many teams as you want! I’m only part of one team this year, but people have been on as many teams as five or even ten. You can only use each item you knit/crochet for one team, however.

What Can I Make? You can do pretty much whatever you want, actually! There are events for spinning, for finishing up old WIPs, for sheer volume of items made, for intarsia, etc. If you can dream it up, there’s an event for you!

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With the basic questions done, now on to how this will affect the blog. As you can imagine, I’m going to be knitting hats for the Ravelympics. I’ve got some gorgeous brown wool that was donated to One Hundred Hats some months ago, and I’ve decided to power through all of it in a two week span.

These seven skeins will hopefully become seven Brangelina hats (thanks to Crazy Aunt Purl for her free hat pattern!) by the time February – and the Olympics – are over. This means several things, of course, for the One Hundred Hats project overall, and because of this, I’ve made three rules:

1. The hats knit for the Ravelympics will count only as one hat. Because I am using the same pattern over and over again (mostly for ease of knitting during the Ravelympics, as well as for planning the thing), and because my goal is to knit One Hundred Hats from one hundred different patterns, this only seems fair.

2. Regular hat posting for the project will continue, unabated. I’ve been knitting my fingers to the bone to get ahead on my hat knitting so that I could participate in this project without too much of a problem, so I’ll have plenty of hats to post about during that two week span. I’ll be posting updates to the Ravelympics as well, but I don’t want to fall off schedule because of this.

3. All the hats knitted for the Ravelympics will officially count as the 50th hat for the project. As the Olympics wind down right at the end of February, and the 50th hat celebration kicks off the very next day (March 1!!), it seems only fitting to share the hats I’ve made for the Ravelympics as my 50th hat! This will also give me the chance to go into more detail about the two week process of knitting the hats, share some war wounds (if there are any) and more!

I’m getting excited for this challenge to kick off! More to come soon on the 50th hat celebration as well – I’ve got tons of fun treats planned, and it’s going to be a blasty-blast for sure!

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Are you on Ravelry? If so, are you participating in the Ravelympics? I had thought about starting a One Hundred Hats team this year, but it didn’t pan out – frankly, with planning the 50th hat celebration, I’m not sure I could have handled it! However, I’d love to hear what some of you are knitting during that time-frame , whether it’s for the Ravelympics or not!

So go ahead and share your blog links in the comments to this post, and I’ll go ahead and start a link list in the side-bar – an Olympic list for Olympic knitters!