Hitting the road

I need to finish getting ready for the trip up to Snohomish to see my sister's family and the stepfamily I was raised with. We'll drive back down later this evening, sleep, get up early again and go over to Judy's for the Hawes family get together. We'll spend the afternoon there and be home again. Saturday afternoon we're scheduled to be down in Salem for my dad's side of the family get together. I have hopes of seeing Cole for the first time, but not holding my breath.

Judy's French Press Slippers were finished in the late hours last night. I left them drying overnight with the black puff paint on the bottom. I think if I do these again I'm going to try to do them with a wider sole. I have wide feet and these don't feel like they fit my foot. Since its not my foot they have to fit, not terribly concerned. I'll take a better picture of them on Judy's feet - with her permission of course!  Until then, here they are:

I hope your holidays are safe and happy! 

ETA: Judy's feet had the same problem with the sides being low as I did with them. Over felting? Not high enough sides? I'm going to next try the House Slippers pattern out of the Knit 2 Together book. I can use up some leftover Cascade 220 and still do some cute stuff to make them special. If you're on Ravelry and still want to do the French Press Felted Slippers, there is a person in there that has adapted the pattern to be picked up, so no seaming.  

I have hats!

The Thorpe hat was a learning experience. I've done top down hats before, but its been awhile since I've worked with chunky yarn. The first one I did with worsted doubled so that I could get the chunky. It came out fine, a little heavy feeling. I then tried to do the hat with just the strand of worsted yarn and thought I needed to really increase the size to have it come out. For some reason I didn't check until the very end. The hat ended up HUGE. It was loose on Brandon's big head - hey he says its big, so its okay for me to say it is. ;-) So I switched and did the next hat in the series and did the stranded hat, it worked out better being doubled. Then it was back to trying to get the hats to work as worsted. I kept to the size US 9 rather than trying the US 7 and things worked.

The hats:

 

 

 

 

Some fudge has been made and a batch of the peanut butter cup candy. Along with the cookies, set with the sweet stuff I think. There are a couple of cake type recipes that I'd like to do, but they may be for New Year's.

I'm testing out the French Press Felted Slippers pattern. Rachel tried to get them to come out and had something that resembled a baked potato for her efforts. I'm definitely not as fast as the Yarn Harlot in making them, or her friend that claimed to be able to do them in 90 minutes. I'm not saying how long they took me to knit up. I have all the pieces knitted and tried to seam up one and ended up with something looking odd, so need to re-evaluate the project - when I don't have a migraine. Yes, one of those evil things showed up Monday night and has yet to vacate the premises. If I can get them to work, I'll buy my own copy and then hopefully the pattern for children that she has planned.

I knitted the large size, because I'm not sure if Judy wears an 8 or 9 and figured better to have a little room than not enough. Well and Rachel had said she knitted the 8 and it looked really small. I have a front loader machine so it will be fun trying to get them to felt.