3 Easy Beanie Mods

I love beanies. Like shoes and scarves, I feel like you can never have too many. Since it's finally starting to get cold where I live, I thought I'd put together a few ways to spruce up some simple, plain beanies.

A summary of the video will follow!

For the first beanie I embellished it with two pom poms to give it a sort of teddy bear ear-esque look. Hover over the images or click on them to see instructions!

This second beanie mod is inspired by Korean fashion. One of my guilty pleasures is Kpop music, and I feel like I was always seeing the idols wearing cute beanies with really long bunny ear like bumps on top. I decided I needed to own something similar. And here it is! Hover over the images or click on them to see instructions!

This last beanie mod isn't reminiscent of any kind of animals like the last two were. This one is simply if you wanted to add a little edge to the thing. Hover over the images or click on them to see instructions!

And those are the beanie modifications I wanted to share with you all! I hope you all liked them. I'm super excited to add these guys to my beanie rotation now!

Laurel Earwarmers

I've been watching the Olympics for the past few days, and even though it's summer time, it inspired me to make these ear warmers. The warmers are inspired by the laurel wreaths that the winning Olympians would be crowned with. I had just learned the crocodile stitch and it ended up being the perfect stitch for this project because of how much it looks like leaves.

Here it is. A front view, side view and back view.

And here's how it looks being worn:

Front, side and back. I actually really like how it turned out and can't wait for it to get cold so I can wear it around!

Socks socks socks!

     I taught myself how to knit, so I've never been really adventurous with my knitting projects. I pretty much only knew how to knit and purl so all of my projects were scarves, and even then I can probably count on one hand how many of those I've finished. So what got in my head about knitting some socks? I think it was when I was digging through my yarn stash and came across a bag full of alpaca yarn that my boyfriends parents got for me while they were in Peru. To me it looked like it was the perfect weight for socks and I had just found a few sets of double pointed needles. It was obvious, I had to knit some socks. I had to. I only had sets of 4 dpns all in different sizes, but almost every pattern I came across called for a set of 5 dpns. Finally I came across Silver's sock class. Using this pattern successfully made my first sock!

Unfortunately it was a tad too big. I used the directions for sock weight yarn. I decided not to waste my time and yarn making a matching sock for that one. Instead I jumped right into another much more advanced sock making technique. I had heard about people knitting two socks at the same time, one inside the other on dpns, and I was determined to try it myself. I took some progress pictures along the way so I could share them with you all!

Humble beginnings.

Working on the gusset.

Here I've flipped the other sock out to show that I really am doing two at once, one inside the other.

Toes!

Instead of trying to do the kitchener stitch with both socks on the same needles(I knew I'd probably accidentally sew them together) I moved the stitches around so each sock had it's own pair of needles. I stitched the inside sock, then the outter sock.

Yay socks!

I've been thinking about dyeing them though. They look a little too ketchup and mustardy to me.

Sailor's Knot Bracelet

In order to get myself back in the crafting groove I've been doing some quick and easy things like making simple jewelry and little amigurumi.  When I finish my crochet project I'll post it here, but for now I have an awesome bracelet to talk about.  Almost a month ago Etsy ran a "How-Tuesday" where Simone Tan (a.k.a Groundsel) explained how to make a sailor's knot bracelet.  I actually saw this post a few days ago and as soon as I finished reading it I grabbed the first skein of yarn closest to me and started to knot.  Here is the finished bracelet:

It's kind of small and skinny because I just used normal yarn.  I wanted to make something chunkier so I headed to my local craft store and bought some thicker silver rope stuff and some even thicker cording.  Here it is with the silver rope:

This one is my absolute favorite and I've been wearing it every day since I've made it.  The silver rope makes it look more "fancy" so I can wear it when I'm being more dressy as well as just wearing it casually.

Here they are next to each other on me.  I think this style of bracelet looks better larger.  This brings us to the cording.

This stuff is really thick, and unfortunately I didn't get enough of it to make a bracelet so that's going to have to come later whenever I find the time to go buy more of this stuff.  Luckily it's only like .29 cents a yard!  I think I'll probably make a fabric bowl with this cording I have now.  I've been itching to make one for a while.

Sailor's knot bracelet tutorial: Here!

Fabric bowl tutorial:  Here!

An oldie but a goldie: Mohawk Beanie!

I don't have time to make anything today, so I figured I'd show you guys one of my older crafts that I'm pretty proud of. Since I made a beanie last night, I'll post another beanie today! I give you, the mohawk beanie. It's inspired by the book from knit-head, Pretty in Punk. They offer knitting patterns, but at that time, I wasn't confident with my knitting skills, so I decided to crochet it up! Here are the results:

Myspace angled shot.

Closeup of the 'hawk.

Detail of the string off of the ear warmers.

Here's a blue one!