Spinning with my Matchless

I bought a new Matchless.  Last Sunday.  She's gorgeous.  She actually is an older Matchless, made in April of 1999.  She's had a lot of use, but the woman who bought her hasn't had time to spin with her, and gave her to her daughter, who sold it to me.  I've been spinning the roving she had brought for me to try her out.  Love it!  I believe she said this is Shetland. 

And I love the orifice hook I bought from Barefoot on the Farm:  https://www.etsy.com/listing/187324289/

So pretty.  Perfect for this wheel. 

Football Hat recipe

I don't know who originally designed and knit this hat, but I want to make some of these and took notes of what it looks like: 

Cast on 70 in the round.  Knit 9 rows in brown (9 Vs) in Stockinette, which makes a curled edge

Knit 4 rows cream

Knit 25 rows brown

Knit 4 rows cream

Knit 3 rows brown

Begin decrease rows: 10 k2tog (right slanting) spaced 7 stitches apart, Knit 5, k2tog ten times.  Then knit one row plain.  Knit 4, k2 tog.  Repeat till you are down to the last 12 or so stitches then just keep k2tog each row till you're down to two stitches.  Run the tail through those two and seam it into the inside of the hat. 

The seam part in cream covers four stitches, in the middle of the Vs. So really, it covers three upside down Vs.  It starts on the fourth row of brown, and leaves four rows at the top.  The extra stitching part covers two upside down Vs on either side, every four rows, total of five horizontal stitches. 

Football Hat fixed

My co-worker came up to me on Dec 23.  He said to me in the kitchen, "I have a knitting question for you."  Really!  A knitting question.  I was intrigued.  I walked back to his desk and he showed me this:

Oh, uh. Boo boo. And it didn't look like it had enough yarn to rework it. I told him I thought I could fix it, but needed the break over Christmas to do so. We talked about whether I could use another color for the tip if I couldn't find a brown, and he agreed that a cream would be ok. 

I asked all my buddies if they had a match for the brown, and Becky thought she did, but not in acrylic.  I then checked with Mary Ann, who has oodles of Simply Soft, but she said the yarn was thinner than Simply Soft when I showed her.  Ah, but her house is about a mile away from Michael's, so I stopped there on the way home.  I also didn't want to risk ordering something online from JoAnn's, because I knew the child would be wanting it asap.  Well, Michael's had three browns to choose from, and I ended up with a too thin Loops and Threads superfine weight, which I doubled.  I had a 50% off coupon in my email, and the very patient man at the register helped me get the right store location on my app and navigated me to the coupon, so I could pay a whopping total of $1.50 cash for the yarn.  My entire purchase.  Ha!  I love the hunt for a bargain and the conquest!

And here is the finished product, my first finished project of the year:

I ended up ripping back only one row or so, and then worked the k2tog rather tightly until there was just 1.5" of the old yarn left.  Then, I tied that to the new yarn which I had doubled, and kept going with the decreases till there were only two left.  I used my needle to thread it through the last two loops, and brought the tail to the inside, and aggressively tacked the ends in.  I know it's a little pointy.  But I didn't want to risk the stitches coming loose again, and hey, it's supposed to look like a football. 

The inside:

I brought it in Jan 2 and was glad to see out of our skeleton crew that the dad was in that day.  So glad I finished it the night before, as his two year old was missing his hat.  Here Jake is modeling with the it: