Twinkle two-fer

Pattern: Pilot Hat fom Twinkle's Big City Knits
yarn: Cascade Magnum in #9418
needles: Denise interchangeables, US #19

Hmmm, so a couple posts ago I was all braggy about how I had picked up a couple of long standing WIPs and wasn't going to work on anything else until they were done...

Right, well you know where that goes --inevitably I got bored with my sense of never-ending incompletion, and had to bust something out in an effort to feel like I actually can.

Nothing is better for one's knitting self esteem than a small Twinkle project. They look good and go up FAST.

They don't however, look good ON:



Now, having just spent a day in California's Disneyland a week ago, maybe I had some unwitting NEED to make this hat, because after seeing so much of this it had to have been stuck in my frontal lobe. The resemblance is uncanny, no? (apologies to the two dudes whose photo I just stole off flickr...)

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I should know better when even the model is having trouble pulling it off.



Still, I think maybe if I move the buttons up an inch or two so that the flaps are less floppy, I may like it more. But will I ever get around to that?

I did though, loooove this yarn. So, the next night I decided to give the Aspen hat another whirl. Now, I had made this once before with mediocre results. But for the most part, attributed that to my yarn choice.

And I was definitely happier with it this round, but still kinda meh.



It's definitely a cute hat, and I was smart enough to make it a little deeper than my last attempt, but I dunno, I think I just don't like how it looks on me.

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I'm going to throw it on the gift pile and am still planning to make a few more as well...it's really too darn cute and fast *not* to.

And SPEAKING of California...

(I'll try to make this relatively brief, but if anyone did want to see more non-knitting related photos of my trip, those can all be found on my flickr)

But truthfully, I don't have much to report knitting-wise anyway. It really wasn't a trip about that. Any yarn stores I did hit were for the most part a total fluke (not to mention not much knitting getting done in airports or long car rides for some reason) and my bank account is thanking me, as I only managed to come home with these two lowly specimens:

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Sad, huh?

Sheer novelties. Twinkle really isn't available in my neck of the woods, so as soon as I saw it I filled my arms up. I got to four skeins of the raspberry (the most they had of any given colour) --not quite enough for a whole sweater, and thought "anything I make out of this will have me looking like a stuffed sausage anyway", so I put it all back save for one (again, likely another Aspen hat...).

But I bought it at a really cute store called The Grove which was kind of half yarn store, half tchotchke store (for lack of a better description...). Lots of Brown Sheep company yarn too (also hard to get around these parts...).





I'm sure if I lived in San Diego I'd be heading there a fair bit. The other place I really wanted to get to was called "Knitting in La Jolla" (sorry I can't find a website...), but we just ran out of time. Further up the Pacific Coast Highway in San Luis Obsipo I stumbled upon this place while looking for a breakfast joint (the greatest breakfast EVER, I might add):



A total hole in the wall, where I bought that linie novelty yarn, also pictured. It's not so much a yarn as it is an already knit tape where you just endlessly knit the same four stitches (that you've picked up off of it) until you come up with something that resembles this:



I took a picture of it just so I could remember how to do it. The shop owner seemed to think that one ball would suffice, but I dunno, I'm not really convinced.

Which brings me to, by far the COOLEST yarn related thing I came across on this trip.



Oh yes. It is just so freakin' awesome. We spent a fair bit of time at John Reis' bar, the Pink Elephant in North Park, San Diego. And that is another story unto itself, so I will save that for a different venue apart from mentionning that one of the owner's moms crocheted that pink elephant for the bar, without a pattern. I almost wish I could have met her more than any of the Swami folks.

Ok, here's one more:



It really was all I could do not to run off with it.