My Hat

 I went home last night thinking that I would download the How Cold Is It patttern and start working.  I was wrong.  There was no internet at the other house, so I ended up just reading.  I finished my book (Shatterglass by Tamora Pierce - I was just a little too old for her books when they first came out, and I've been catching up on her body of work recently).  But I got up bright and early and got started.  I reviewed a couple of hats knit in fingering weight yarn, Barley Light and Sockhead Slouch to get an idea of what kind of stitch counts and sizing I needed.  I smooshed them together with the mitten pattern and came up with a plan.  I would do my ribbing on my size 2 needle and then switch to a size 3 (literally chosen because I could find a 16" needle and a [mismatched] set of dpns in that size) and increase a bit for the pattern.  So I cast on 132 stitches, worked 1 1/2 inches of 1X1 ribbing, then switched to a size 3 needle and increased 12 stitches to 144 stitches.  This gave me 4 repeats of a 36 st pattern (the front of the mitten is 36 sts.)  I charted a 36 st repeat of just some "snow" that kind of matched the front of the mitten and will repeat that in 3 quadrants with the mitten pattern in the 4th.  The base of the mitten is a 12 st pattern that I could repeat all the way around.  So here I am, just starting the text/snow part of the pattern.

The only problem is that this requires all my concentration, so no watching tv, no reading while knitting.  Which means that I have to come up with another project to knit while I'm reading in bed before going to sleep (when I usually knit socks).  I'll have to think about it.  I just don't think I'm up to it today.  I would take the Big Blue Blanket but it's like, huge.  Too big to haul the 3 blocks to the other house.  There's a tangled skein I have next to the bed right now.  Maybe I'll work on getting that untangled.