Woven Sunflowers

This set is for my best friend Shelley, who I believe is too busy to be online at all, let alone looking at blogs! It was my intention to also knit her a pair of fingerless gloves, but those will have to wait until after Christmas! The hat is the Sunflower Tam from Nora Gaughan's Knitting Nature. I found this book really inspirational even if I would not knit all the designs. Still there were several that I liked. Basically she has looked at nature and taken the mathematical principles from that and incorporated it into knitting design. It really illustrates to me how incredibly complex God created our beautiful planet! I'd really like to do the Hexagon Coat, but as a jacket, not a long coat, so I am going to have to do some reading and see how to shorten that.

The scarf, I showed one end of before. It has about 4.5 feet of ribbing, so that was a good project to work on when I wanted to concentrate on something else while knitting. It is the Woven Cable Scarf from Miriam Felton. I plan on knitting this again in the future. I would love to do one in the recommended cashmere, but it would be pretty hard on my budget. There is a beautiful wrap using the cable pattern repeatedly and that would be wonderful for winter time dramatic fashion wear!

The yarn used is Knit Pick's Wool of the Andes in "Amethyst Heather". For the cap, the wool was not quite heavy enough so I ran along a strand of Knit Pick's Shadow in the color "Grape Jelly". I was worried that the yarn would not be soft enough but this wool was softer than Paton's Classic Merino, so I was pleased with the outcome and would not hesitate to used it again. My only complaint was that one skein (out of ten) had several sections that were as if the yarn had gotten shredded in the machinery. Since it was only one skein and the rest did not even have knots in them, I am not complaining. Likely that was just a fluke (I am hoping!).

Well, now I better get back to packing so DH can take them to the UPS store and ship them off!