Introduction: Bear Hat & Mittens

Hi everyone, my name is Jennifer and I'm an astronomer - I study as a Ph.D graduate student in New York City. However, if you came to this blog looking for astronomical related things, you may be a bit disappointed.

Now don't get me wrong - I love my work and am very happy with my career choices. But I also live in one of the most fantastic cities in the world, I am a hiking and backpacking enthusiast, I knit and sew, and one of my joys when I come home from the office is to cook awesome new things. So I wanted to create a place to record my various projects and interests, and to remind myself NOT to get bogged down pouring through data. I will undoubtedly post some astro stuff here - it's a major part of my life - but that is not my intended focus for this blog.

Bear hat, as modeled by my father

To get started off, let's take a look at my most recent knitting project. Recently, a cousin of mine and his wife had their very first child, Jack. So, in anticipation of this happy event, over the summer I worked on a hat and mittens pair, using some very nice angora wool yarn which I purchased at the Union Square Farmers' Market. I bought two tones of brown: one for the general "fur" and a lighter one for the pawprints and the ears.  They weren't as high contrast as I originally thought, but I think the project turned out fairly well.

Paw print mittens

You can find the (free!) pattern I used here, from Stitch Nation. I only really used one ream of yarn to do both hat and mittens (for the newborn size) but of course I used two, since I wanted the color contrast for the paw prints. So now I have almost an entire ball of very nice wool yarn to use for a future project!

So, materials are 1 or 2 reams of yarn, plus some double pointed needles for knitting in the round.  It was a little tricky knitting the mittens in the round since they are so small, so a crochet hook also helped. For the paw prints, you'll want an embroidery needle - though I'd misplaced mine and just used a bobby pin to pull the yarn through, that worked just fine.

Jennifer's first hat, circa 1995

Now, this is not the first hat I've made - I went to a Waldorf School in elementary, where everyone in the class learns to knit, sew, crochet, and so on and so fifth. So the first hat I knit was in the third grade - a hat I still wear in the winter and which has lasted quite well, stretched out though it may be. My second hat ever I gave to my boyfriend as a Christmas present last year, and do not currently have a picture of. However, this was my first baby sized hat. And I realized, as I was knitting it, that I have a TERRIBLE sense of scale when thinking about babies. I was first completely paranoid that the hat was going to be too small (because... it was so small and cute!), especially since I'm not seeing the baby until Thanksgiving, and he was born in early September.  But I was assured by people who know babies (namely, my parents) that they were sure it would fit fine then, though of course he'll grow out of it eventually.

Note the LENGTH of the hat...

But now I worry the hat is a little too long - when I have held it up for people, they tend to orient it the wrong way, so that that the long end is down, when that part should be horizontal. I guess I'll just have to show the parents how it's supposed to go when I give it to them. We shall see.

I was very happy about how the buttons turned out - I was at my grandfather's house when I was finishing up the sewing part of this project, and I didn't actually have a pair of buttons to use for the strap, just one that I'd used as a temporary hold (which is the one in the first picture).  I'd asked my mother to bring up her "button jar" from Baltimore to see if I could find a pair that suited the hat, though she didn't want to give me ALL of her buttons. However, my grandfather informed me that he still had all of my grandmother's old sewing materials, and among these was a band-aid tin full of buttons! So now I have a button jar of my own, and in it found a set of THREE buttons which went extremely well. So, I'm sending along an extra to go with the hat, in case an accident occurs, as they tend to do.

I have yet to start a new knitting project, but as I said, I have a nice ball of wool yarn, plus a couple other balls of some courser yarn sitting around. I've been thinking of trying my hand at making a stuffed animal of some sort for Christmas, but I haven't done THAT since the FIRST grade, and that was just a very simple starting project. And I'd need to find some stuffing. But then again, I DID find some interesting look patterns... we shall see!