Dragon-palooza!

Yeah.

The Morehouse Farm dragon scarf is really, really popular. It's so popular, in fact, that I'm making another one. This one is for a little girl and her dad asked me to make her one in pink. I said, "Barbie pink? Pepto-Bismol pink? Baby pink?"  I don't think he realized that there were options.

After looking around his office and finding an appropriate pink on a poster, the deal was struck. I would make a dragon scarf for his daughter but would make is shorter to better fit an almost-5-year-old's neck.

I stopped at my local yarn shop a couple of days later and found this amazing pink heather. It's not exactly what he'd asked for - the pink is a little darker - but the heather pattern in the yarn just makes me smile. I
couldn't imagine a little girl not liking it. Thanks to technology a decision was made on the spot. I snapped a photo of the yarn choices with my phone and emailed them directly to my friend so he could decide. He picked the heather (yea!) Two skeins later and I was on my way.

The pattern went really quickly since it's my third run through it in the last 9 months. This time, however, I needed to truncate the pattern so that the body of the dragon would be short enough for a little kid. I accomplished this by cutting short each sequence of spikes by one. So, for example, if the spike sequence was supposed to be repeated three times, I repeated it twice. If it was twice, I'd just do one. I was worried that it would distort the progression of the body (the scarf gets wider with every spike sequence) but it didn't. The finished product looks as perfect as the earlier versions, just about 7 inches shorter!

Because I shortened the pattern, I ended up with a ton of leftover yarn - probably an 1/8 of a skein. Plus I still had the second just-in-case skein. In a moment of shear madness, I decided to try to make a dragon hat to go with the scarf. I didn't have a pattern - just an idea of how it might work. So, I knit up the dragon tail as if I were going to make a scarf. At the end of spike #6, I took some double pointed needles and picked up a bunch of stitches down both sides of the tail. Then I started knitting in the round.

At first, I just knit. But after a few inches I decided that I didn't like the way the garter stitch looked so I ran a "lifeline" through the original picked-up stitches and ripped back. I also started checking patterns to see if I even had enough stitches to make a hat for a 5 year old. I'd kind of forgotten that the hat actually had to fit. I chose 77 stitches since that seemed to be pretty common for a small child's hat. This meant that I had to increase by 20 stitches - which I did as I started doing the body of the hat in moss stitch.

Moss stitch is awesome. It has a great texture and it's crazy easy to do. I like that the body of the hat kind of looks like dragon scales now. At Cassandra's suggestion, I did moss stitch for a little more than half the hat and then moved to rib stitch to finish the "rim" of the hat. My only concern now is that the hat may not be big enough. I've had multiple people tell me that it looks too small.... argh.  We'll see.

There's still a lot of yarn left. I'm thinking she may need some mittens to go with the set now. ;)  I'll keep y'all posted.

- Alex