Christmas 2013

This year has been very hard for my family, a lot harder than I ever thought it would be. As the holiday season has drawn closer I decided I wanted to make some of my kids' Christmas presents again this year. I wanted to make each child a new hat, mittens, and a doll of some kind. My son decided he wanted his gloves to be Green and Yellow, I think he said that these colors are "Lions" colors (one of the professional football teams). He wanted the main part of the gloves green, then the fingers and thumb sections to be yellow. At this point I had only made 1 pair of finger-less gloves, and 1 pair of mittens (an out of necessity creation which I will post about later). While I knew I could make the mittens, I also knew I would not be able to hide the mittens from the kids since I would need them to try on the mittens to make sure they fit right. I could have avoided this problem but I wanted them to be custom fit to their hands. So after a lot of trial and error, here are my son's gloves.

Detroit Lions Hat and Mittens Set

 Once the gloves were finished, I knew that I needed to also make him a matching hat. It's not the hat he had originally picked, but it matches his gloves perfectly. I think the combination looks pretty dang good. While they may not be my colors, they are definitely his. :-)

Now as my son was picking out the colors for his hat, my daughter started searching through my yarn and pulling out the colors she wanted. She ended up picking, blue, purple, pink, yellow and green. 5 colors for a hat... what to do, what to do??? I had been inspired by a Lollipop Hat that I had seen a while back on the blog Snowcatcher. Here is the hat that I saw:


I think this is the coolest hat!!! Since my daughter wanted a lot of colors in her hat, why not finally make this hat??? So that is what I did. I let her pick the order for the colors, she decided she wanted the colors in pink, purple, yellow, green, then blue.

I started out with 2 stitches of each in the foundation the swirled each color around. I also decided it would be fun to have different colored ear flaps. She didn't want braids or a big poof ball on top :-( but hey, she loves her lollipop hat just the way it is, and that's all that matters. (don't mind the blurry green and yellow. My daughter was being wiggly so my son thought he would try to help. :-p )

 The next task was to make her matching mittens. I decided to put each color in the cuff, then to just make the mittens striped. I wanted the mittens to completely match so for some whimsy I decided to make the thumbs match the ear flaps. My thought was that hopefully that will help her remember which way to put her hat on (I doubt it but it was my goal). One thumb is blue, the other purple, one ear flap blue, the other purple.

Even though they did not get their hat and mittens on Christmas morning, they are still extremely excited for their new winter-wear. I will post instructions for each item in a couple days.