fo fail: the vow sweater

Sometimes you have a genius idea. You're going to do something amazing--namely take a sweater from a movie and turn it into a reality in your very own wardrobe. You design it, and you feel very smug because you, yes, you just designed a sweater that looks like one from the movie. And you knit it up and block it and make it up...only to discover it looks like the unfortunate offspring of a cardboard box and a burlap sack.

Yeah. Not the most flattering thing I've ever knit.

Somewhat needless to say, that sad attempt at a reconstruction is now neat pile of teal yarn balls for use in a new sweater project. Except for the sleeves. Those turned out to be fine. (So I can design sleeves but not a whole sweater.)

But hindsight being 20/20 and all that, I remembered how some clothes will look bad on me, despite being really pretty on the shelf, just because we all have different figures, yada, yada, yada. I'm pretty sure we all know the speech. So something oversized will automatically make me look like I've eaten a few too many slices of cake.

But, hey, on the bright side, this is going to make me try harder to actually make flattering clothes instead of just making whatever I like. Or at least until I fall in love with the next super unflattering-yet-gorgeous pattern.

a gig 'em kind of fo: the aggie hats

During the summer, I'm the kind of knitter who speed knits like she has a bet about Ravelympics (oops, make that the "Ravellenic Games"). So when two of my best friends asked for Texas A&M hats for this fall, who would expect me to say no? Especially when I had the perfect maroon and white yarn just sitting around at home, screaming to be made into hats for a couple of spirited College Station freshmen.

Enter: the Aggie hats. (I apologize in advance for the crappy/webcam/inside picture. I'm still in the process of acquiring a digital camera. So until then, it's going to bad angles and bad side lighting. Bleh.)

These are practically identical twin hats, but their mother knows that the one on top is more round and tam-ish, the bottom one is triangular (don't ask), and they have different colored centers.

Raveled here and here.

Pattern: One was basically self-designed. The other was half me, half Brambles. We'll call that one a very drastic mod.

Yarn: some slightly sketchy acrylic that I acquired from my Statistics teacher because I and three of my friends knit through that class.

These were super quick projects. Or it started out that way. I cast on for the first one on the Fourth of July and cast off shortly after the fireworks. And then like the AP nerd that I am, I got suckered into cramming for my French placement test by the seductive promises of my old AP study guide. It said all these things about how I'd do so much better on the test if I knew how to use the subjunctive and the difference between "dont" and "duquel" and how it only wanted to help me. But just like it always does, it only left me with a headache and a lowered self-esteem, along with the confirmed belief that "je vais l'échouer comme l'idiote que je pense que je sois" . Doesn't it just always turn out that way?

And after I recovered from the crushing blow that the French review doled out, I put off the finishing bit...so making these took closer to two weeks than I'd like to admit.

But they got finished eventually, and they're pretty cute now.