more sci-fi yarns

The holidays are busy, i'm a babysitter. School's out and my house is full! I cooked my first turkey, which, considering i've been a vegetarian for about 12 years or so, came out woderfully. I combined the American Test Kitchen Brining method with Martha Stewart's mummy wrapping cooking method. i tell you, the smell alone was enought to almost make me fall off the wagon.

I got the Firefly DVD set for the xmas thing, and i made a jayne cobb hat from the episode, the message. i love jayne. i've written freakin' fan fiction about jayne. it's sad. i'm sad. but the hat is kind of nice. I'd looked at the DVD over and over to get a look at how the hat is made, and it seems to be that the earflaps are added on after the fact. i wanted a a hat that I would actually wear, and that meant seamless construction. So i figured i could knit a hat from the top down, by going in reverse from a normal hat. So i cast on six stitches of microspun by lion yarns on to size US 4 double pointed needles, and increase twice each needle using a Make one increase, for about 8 rows or so. then i increased every other row, one stitch from each end of each needle, untill i had 144 stitches. i then continued on
in yellow for a few inches, and swithed to the orange by knitting one row in alternating colors,
to soften the blend. sort of faire isle stylie, one colour in each hand. very akward, but again, my first try. i did that for a few rows and then said, earflap time! i put 30 sts on a holder for each flap, and then what was to become the ribbing on other holders. i then grabbed th red and worked the flaps for twenty rows before decreasing using ssk and k2tog until i had three sts left to do icords. after both flaps were done, i moved on to the ribbing. i did five, maybe six rows of k1, p1 ribbing, then bound off. the seems where the flaps meet the ribbing needed to be joined, and the ends woven in. and ta-da! jayne 1.0

now i see things i want to change on the next hat, a longer band of orange, and also to do it double stranded to add a bit more stiffness and bulk. it's a bit too fine, the gauge is 6 sts per inch, a place i like to work, but i think mrs. cobb used a bulkier wool. the earflaps in the show stick out from jayne's head, i think they may have been done in garter stitch, but it's hard to tell. mine tend to curl a bit, but the selvedge edge looks nice, and i was thinking of adding an interior lining of red felt for warmth and curl prevention. also, the hat is a tad long, it tends to slip down too low on my forehead.

We leave for NY in less than a week, i've got to get the hat for my dad done. the next version of the jaynehat will just have to wait.