One Very Happy Girl

 Look at that beautiful face!

That's a girl who just got EXACTLY what she wanted.

A couple of months ago my Princess went through the KnitPicks catalog as if it were her own private knitting list.  I swear she had circled half of the patterns in the catalog by the time she finished...much to my great chagrin.  As I literaly didn't knit anything for my girls in 2011, I was happy to make something....just not the entire catalog.  Ultimately she decided that the one thing she really wanted was the Andean Chullo, which was perfect because she had outgrown the last hat I knit for her.

Originally I had intended to use the Palette I already owned to make the hat, and so I purchased the downloadable format of the pattern.  After Christmas when I sat  down to put the colors together I realized I had one big problem.  Although I had a LOT of Palette, I had NO blue...and blue was the one color I knew that she wanted more than any other.

So back to KnitPicks' website where the kits were now on sale.

I bought two.

 Andean Chullo by Kerin Dimeler-Laurence

Grey kit by KnitPicks

US 2.5 mm needles - 24" and 16" addi turbo circulars and Knit Picks Harmony DPN's

January 4-8, 2011

I only made two very minor alterations to the pattern.  The first is that I replaced the grey color meant for the very top of the crown pattern with the Princess's favorite blue.  The second is that I worked the i-cord edging from the bottom tip of the ear flap on both sides (rather than going the same direction....it makes sense if you know the pattern), doing the Kitchner stitch at the base of each ear flap to join the i-cords.  It simply made more sense to do it that way as I knew the appearance of the i-cord would thus be identical.

There is a LOT of leftover yarn from just a single kit.

So why two bags? 

Simple enough...she wants a matching scarf and mittens.

PS.  We are calling them llamas, not alpacas, and have thus dedicated this hat to JoJo...the most amazing, most hilarious, sweetest llama in the world!