Elizabeth Zimmermann could reasonably be considered knitting royalty.  She’s written a number of books, has done a knitting series on PBS with her daughter Meg Swanson, and is widely considered to have brought the art of knitting back into vogue in the United States.

I posted a few weeks ago about a hat I’d made from a pattern of my own design.  In the course of that post, I referenced head measurements.  Specifically, my own head measurements.  And the hat was gorgeous and fit me beautifully.  However.  I have many (MANY) knit hats already and I honestly didn’t need another.  So I thought it would make a nice Christmas gift for a friend of mine.  So I left it in her cubby at work and didn’t think anything more about it until I finally got around to asking her a couple weeks later if the hat fit her.  No.  It didn’t fit her.  Because her head is smaller than mine.

In 2016, I decided for some reason that now escapes me that all three of the nephews needed handknit hats for Christmas.  And I wanted to use down some of my (really ridiculous) stash of sock yarn, so I went looking for hat patterns using fingering weight yarn.  And I didn’t find a single one that I liked.  I just wanted a simple hat pattern, but I couldn’t find one.  Most patterns were with worsted weight yarn.  So…I made one myself.

As my favorite sister-in-law’s birthday approaches, I had set aside a few things to send her that I thought she might enjoy. Amongst the pile of items to be mailed to her were a couple bars of my favorite soap “Shea’s All That,” made by a lady who runs an online business called Goodies Unlimited.

You’ll want to read part 1 first, naturally…

Some folks (my non-knit-worthy brother, for example) might question why anyone would hand knit socks in this day and age “when you can buy six pairs for $10 at Walmart.” (Walmart! Walmart? Seriously?) All I can say is that a pair of socks custom knit to fit your feet is a sumptuous luxury. Try it and see for yourself.

I like hoods. Not the hoods you find on your average coat or sweatshirt…I mean, I like those hoods just fine, functionally speaking. But what really catches my imagination is the more fantasy-style hoods; elven, medieval, Robin of the Hood’s merry men-style hoods.

I really do think that knitwear designers must be secret geniuses. Take the sock, for example: a hand knit sock is a tube that makes a 90° turn at the heel and then continues on being a tube until you get to the toe, where you close it up. Or, if you were a Philistine and started from the toe, you would end at the top of the sock.

I first saw the original store-bought C.C. Beanie hat on a co-worker, and took a bunch of pictures with the intent of reverse-engineering it myself for hand knitting. Imagine my delight to discover on Ravelry that someone else had already done that work!