Friday, December 30, 2016

Viking Wants Knitted Hats

Normally, my Viking isn't too big on knit items, because he runs very warm, so making warm things for him doesn't quite work. On occasion, he has asked for hats, but they've been usually novelty hats, like his Viking Helm or Blinky the Fish (from the Simpsons).


However, the weather around here has been dipping into the low 30 (deg F) and he generally walks to the train station, so he's asked for a few 'regular' hats that he can wear to work. I was only too happy to oblige! I love knitting hats as they are a quick easy knit and I can swap between socks and hats for work knitting.

We went through my stash and he picked out a few colorways that seemed appropriate for work and we went through Ravelry to look at various hat patterns. He picked the ones he liked, and I started working on hats for him. He has a 23" head, so I have to up-size every hat so that it fits him properly.

The first hat was made out of Madeline Tosh DK. It's a scrumptious yarn and the varigated blue matches his eyes. I used the Koolhaas pattern by Jared Flood.


The second hat is using leftovers of Cascade Greenland yarn (discontinued) that I had left over from other projects. He wanted the green to dominate. I used the Turn a Square hat pattern, also by Jared Flood.

Luckily, hats are a fairly quick knit, plus, I'm tickled that he wants them. He's worn both on multiple occasions now, because the weather has turned rather cold in the mornings. I've got more in the queue for him, but I'm running out of his preferred colors; apparently, his favorite colors differ from mine! So I'll have to pick up more yarn just for him when Stitches comes around.

Thursday, December 29, 2016

Star Wars and Lego

Have you seen the new ROGUE ONE - A Star Wars movie yet? If you haven't, GET THEE TO A MOVIE THEATRE, asap!!

I won't spoil it here, but we might on the podcast so get ready for it. But, I will say this....It's really GOOD. I laughed. I cried. I loved it. And I plan on seeing it several more times in the theatre.

In celebration of the new film, my Viking and I spent a couple hours of our holiday building Legos that we acquired on sale at Target. Needless to say, we had a blast doing it.

This particular build had several different bags, and the instructions have you go through each bag -- showing what it would look like after each stage.

First thing is first, we separated all of the Lego pieces according to size, color, and shape.

Because, it's so much easier to find everything when it's all laid out well. There were a lot of different Lego pieces that I hadn't seen before. It's no longer standard sized blocks.

I wonder if you can guess what we're building. He & I took turns on each page. He'd do two pages, then I did two pages -- it was a collaboration effort, just like most relationships. It took us about two hours to build it from start to finish.

Eventually, we got through all 5 bags of different pieces.

It was a lot of pieces.

But the final effort was so worth it.

A black X-wing you might say....well, it is Po Dameron's x-wing after all, complete with a BB-8 and rebel mechanic.

And it fires off proton torpedoes! How cool is that?



Because you never know when you're going to run into a giant cat....





We also picked up our own separate Lego projects to build. I thought this General Grievous looked way too cool not to build, so I picked this as my personal project.



He's comprised of a lot of different ball joint pieces.






The build, itself, wasn't overtly difficult, but it was a lot of fun. The resulting figure is extremely posable and pretty much looks like he stepped out of the Clone Wars animation.





I think we shall be building more legos in the future. It's just too much fun.