The postillion was struck by lightning

*plays fanfare*

It is done. After a ridiculous amount of time (it feels like), I have the pattern written and the pictures edited. And now I will show you the pictures and provide a link for you to download the pattern. And then I will do the same in knitting and steamfashion. (Sorry, friends, who read both.)

Yes, I'm wearing a white silk scarf and a leather coat. Why? Because sometimes I can't help myself.

Vital Stats

Yarn: Recycled from a wool/acrylic sweater. It has 10 wpis. A good substitute would be 1 skein of Cascade 220 or 2 skeins of Elann Peruvian Highland Wool.
Needles: US 8 / 5 mm
Size: One size, which should fit anywhere from a 21-inch to a 23-inch head (Version 1 will fit up to a 24-inch head comfortably. I was saying 25-inch for Version 1 before, but I tried it on my brother, who has a 23-inch head, and there wasn't enough room to go that big.)
Knitting Time: 6 hours or so

( Pictures and info under the cut )

Download Bombshell Betty, Version 2

I think my next goal is to either find a styrofoam head to photograph hats on or to find a willing model. I'm so tired of taking pictures of hats on my own head. I just keep finding flaws in my face. Like when did I get such dark circles under my eyes? They never go away. Always there. Blah.

I completely spaced on time while knitting tonight, and somehow ended up knitting for two and a half hours without taking more than a five minute break. Stupid "League of Their Own"! Being such a good movie that I lost complete and total track of time.

In that time, though, I got the bulk of the knitting done on the second frilly cogwheel cuff. I would say it took me about two and half hours to knit to the picot bind-off, and that time includes eating dinner. Unfortunately, it took like half an hour to do a third of the picot bind-off, which means that binding off is going to take nearly as long as knitting it. Why, O cruel world? Why?

All this knitting means that either tomorrow is going to be a no knitting day or a pattern writing day. I wrote out the charts for the cogwheel frill cuffs* after dinner, and I realized that their construction is a lot more complicated than I thought. The skills involved include: knitting in the round, knitting on DPNs, lace, reading from charts, two different decreases, picot bind off, and ribbing. Some of those are really basic ones (knitting in the round, DPNs, ribbing), but I know that reading from charts and lace really scare some people. I just sort of whizzed through the first one, despite ripping the whole thing out two or three times for gauge reasons. It was kismet? I dunno. Like most things I do, I feel like I could probably have worked harder on them, but I can't find anything to change, even given my directional decrease goof-up that I ended up liking.

Anyway, I have knit another (very simple) fingerless mitt, and I need some input on it.



Yarn: Cascade 220
Needles: Size 4 US

That above is the prototype, but it's the first picture I wanted to show you, so there. Click on it for a bigger picture.

( Mitts with two color frill )

( Cogwheel cuffs in action )

Er, yes. Look at all this knitting that has suddenly appeared.

_{*These so need a better name.}