Learn a new thing

One of the goals I had for the year was to learn how to double knit. With Thanksgiving and going down to family for dinner, I thought doing a hot pad as a hostess gift would be a great idea. I've used Knitting Help.com as a resource and they add a hot pad that I thought would be easy to learn with, a nice heart pattern.

The directions on how to cast on worked for me, kind of. Keeping the colors consistent in their pairings would have been nice to know also, I read that *after* I got done with this project from the Interweave Knits Fall 2011 magazine article on Extreme Double Knitting. So its firmly in my memory for my next double knitting project, another hot pad for gift giving.

What the directions leave out is to change the chart colors in your head on the even rows. Le sigh. Very frustrating first few rows, where the project almost got pitched across the room before I found someone's very helpful project notes. (I love finding someone else that writes project notes on Ravelry!)

I did use Lamb's Pride Bulky to do the hot pad in so it came out BIG. I left it up to Kristen to decide if she wanted to shrink/felt the hot pad. I did soak and block it before giving it to her.

You can see where I was still trying to keep in the flow of flipping the colors in my head on the bottom right of the red background heart.

Thankfully the IK article explained to me why the hot pad doesn't separate all the way, those color changes for the heart. I thought I was doing something wrong while I was knitting, but soldiered on because I needed to get it done! ;-)

Here's a Ravelry link to the other hot pad I'm going to help reinforce this new skill with - Coffee and Tea DK pot holders.

Have you taught yourself something new this year? Plan on doing something new next year?  Now I have to find something for next year. Any suggestions? (Please no entrelac.)