Starbust {Knitting}

It has been hard to motivate myself to knit a beanie hat this month (i.e. June) - even though I chose to make a baby hat. However the rain in the last couple of days have helped me finished it. It also means that Baby MiH is finally making an appearance on the blog. 

The starbust hat is a free pattern on ravelry, this is supposed to be pre-schooler size, but it may seems to be 6 months in Baby MiH's world... I just have to hope that it will still fit comes September/October.

 Pattern: Starbust Hat (free on Ravelry)

Yarn: Merino Silk DK - hand dyed

Needle size: 4.5mm DPNs
Size: smallest, hoping it would fit for this Autumn - not sure it will. I would make it deeper, as it happens it only just covers his ears. 
Result: A great pattern, well written and very easy to follow and quick.  

The hand-dyed yarn, with its white spots, works again very well for this type of hat. It adds a bit of texture and interest. 

I do love the top of the hat. I was worried it would look too much like the top of a pie, but it does not in the end. I will probably make more of this type for the winter. 

 You may be interested in a couple of related post:

- the hand-dying process is here.
- joining when knitting in the round is here. 

And this is my (late) June entry for 12 hats in one year. 

Steel {DIY | Hand Dying}

Making the most of my stash... This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately - I need to de-stash 1) my future sewing room is going to be small, so I need to clear space and 2) I will then be able to buy more suited material. There was a time when I was buying quite a lot of yarn, fabric or whatever for projects that never materialised in the end. And bits were part of big projects - some elements got used and some did not. This is the case of this white yarn. I used some of it already for my vintage crochet cushion, but I still have a fair amount left. 

With a baby, white is not exactly practical... and then I saw that Libby managed to hand dye her yarn for Outfit 4 - FINALLY someone told me how I could do it and where to get the dye in the UK! I was ready to go.  

* Don't forget to enter my knitting pattern giveaway here*

First I had to make the ball into a skein and tie it so it would not knot. I think I could have made the skein larger to be honest, it would have been a bit easier. However as you will see later I made the ties too tight - don't! 

Then the dying process... I bought the dye from Tall Yarns 'n Tales. On the basis of Libby's colour, I wanted something a bit darker, so I bought two dye kits: Autumn Sky and Charcoal. I did test it on a very small portion of yarn - the proportions were around 3/4 blue and 1/4 charcoal and it was too light. As I have only one skein, I decided that was enough of a test (I thought I was very good to test it in the first place), and went for it: 2/3 blue and 1/3 charcoal - and hoped for the best... There was blue, there was charcoal, it could not go wrong! 

I had 140g of yarn left, I put 4.5l of water (you will see some guidelines in Libby's post) and quite a bit of dye - it is a bit like my cooking style, a bit of this, a bit of that... As you can imagine I don't have any notes on how much dye I actually used... Sorry. I used a stainless steel pot - that I don't use for cooking. And off we went. I kept the temperature under 80 °C. I bought a cooking thermometer to make sure of it.  

Et voila! I present my first (only) skein of Steel in merino silk! And I love the colour, so I am slightly annoyed I was not more precise, but to be honest I needed a more precise scale for small amounts and I did not have one handy. It is worth having! 

The white skein has been in my stash for a couple of years, Steel is already being used! You can see the white speck showing - that is where I tied the yarn too tightly - it is going to look handmade.. Well that is the look I am going for, isn't it!