Ripley Done!

Hi there, Kendra checking in from Cape Cod with my Ripley adventures! My hat is finished but it took a couple of tries. My yarn was a bit thinner than the recommended yarn, but when I knit hats I'm not that concerned with gauge. I used size 9 needles because I tend to knit a bit loose and the yarn looked much better on the smaller needles and I chose the large size to compensate. I decided to make the lace band and got it going - but I'm lucky enough to be on vacation in Cape Cod, so here's me knitting the band on the beach. It was a bit windy but quite the nice knitting setting :)





I kept knitting along and found the pleats amazing! Such a genius design. Just to keep the pretty pictures coming, the next day of working on this hat I was spending the night on Martha's Vineyard at an amazing inn on the beach and this was the beautiful sunset view I did my knitting to!





Adam (my SO) also helped me by knitting some stitches on the hat during our ferry ride back from the Vineyard to the Cape. He's a great continental knitter!





I had decided to make the less slouchy version, but sadly at my gauge and after doing all the decreases, it was just too small. Frogging time! But I'm not such a fan of just ripping out and having to find stitches, so I use a smaller needle to pick up stitches along the row I want to rip down to (shown below), then rip to the stitches on the needle and can then knit from there. Much less traumatic frogging!





This time I made a hybrid of the two slouch versions with 6 rows in between the last pleat and setting up the decreases. Much better! Now I have a wonderful hat that will remind me of the wonder Cape Cod places that it was knit in!





As an aside, we went to an alpaca farm while on Martha's Vineyard which was adorable! Claire, I'm bringing you info about purchasing them. Pet quality alpacas start at $250! Bargain! Not sure how you get them from the island, but I'm sure there's a ferry that let's you bring alpacas :) There were so many babies! So cool.























"They come in many colors." Hah.





Baby! Sorry for the terrible photo - I killed our camera the night before, so we were down to a phone camera at this point.