Imagine

After following the simple charted design of another hat pattern she has made three times now, Leah decided last week that it was time to play with the graph paper and chart her own design. She sketched out a bunch of motifs and eventually decided to put some together into her own hat pattern. The peace sign is the centerpiece of the design and from there she added ocean waves below, mountain peaks above (not well seen in this pic), and the four points of the compass in between. It was dubbed the Peace on Earth hat at first, but then I showed her a John Lennon video and the connection to another image with which she is familiar, and this became the Imagine hat. She then sat right down to knit it up with Scott's super squishy handspun merino as the background and whoknowswhat gray wool from the stash. Finished the very next day and worn with glee...

Since the girl just can't get enough of socializing with fiberfolk, that evening we headed out for the Hartford Stitch & Bitch knit night at Creative Fibers, where I cut the center steek of the sweater I was finishing and Laura showed Leah how to do a Portuguese purl.

She caught on super fast and knit a stockinette square to contribute to the Webs afghan, bringing her total squares completed to four. The Portuguese knitting style is interesting because the yarn is carried around the back of the knitter's neck to provide tension and then simply flicked over to the other side of the needle to make the yarn over. We followed up at home to find more videos of Portuguese knitting style, which led to a video of backwards knitting. We haven't tried that yet, but both thought it was pretty neat for when you're knitting something narrow and don't want to turn it over at the end of each row.