Gray Day

More than the usual amount of knitting got done last week. Here's another sample!

I'm participating in a MKAL that starts September first (That's next week!! ), and the yarn that I've picked for it is this lovely merino/silk blend in grey. Went ahead and swatched for it to determine if I would need to go buy needles or not. I'm not sure how, but I've managed to collect 3 pairs of US6 knit picks interchangeable tips, but I don't have a single one in US 5??

Incidentally, I'll be knitting with the 6's.

Work tends to be pretty slow on Saturdays, so I've started bringing my knitting in. (Waaay too busy for me to knit at work the rest of the week. ) Last week I did an epic 7 rows on my Damask shawl. Although that was a lot of progress, it was a bit demoralizing to spend a WHOLE DAY knitting something without any visual sign of progress, so this past Saturday I cast on a hat instead.

This is the Chelsea Market Hat. And I love it! I've actually had it favorited for awhile, so its a bit of a lucky coincidence that the person I'm knitting this for picked it out!
This is a "commissioned" project in the sense that my coworker asked me what I wanted from him to knit him a hat. My standard reply is "Well if you bring me yarn I'll knit you something with it" because in my experience that usually is too much work for the requester and it spares me from actually having to say 'no, I wont knit you something.' however this guy is super cool. Not only did he bring yarn, he asked all sorts of questions about what type of yarn to get AND he knew exactly what kind of hat he wanted. He spent at least on hour on ravelry looking at patterns and asking me if I could mix and match design elements. The kind of recipient that every knitter dreams of, right?  I managed to get more than half way done with the hat at work, finished up the pattern repeats last night, and am now just waiting to do the decreases. I'll take it in next week and let him check out the fit and see if it has the correct amount of slouch before decreasing and binding off!

Thanks for reading, be sure to see what other people are working on at Tami's!