Maybe Steve Jobs Wants One Too?

My dad is a computer "nerd" and even though his work requires him to use PCs, he has always loved Apple products. He is an iPhone user, has a new iMac desktop, and is already dreaming about reasons he "needs" an iPad. After seeing pictures of the hats I've been making recently, he requested an Apple-themed hat. He originally mentioned the retro, multi-coloured Apple logo:

Making this would have required buying 6 different balls of yarn, only to use just a few inches of each. This didn't seem practical for a thrifty person like me, so I thought of other things I could do with an Apple picture. I came up with the dorky idea of making it an iHat. I then wanted to experiment with writing words in yarn and after seeing a Simpsons episode about a Mapple myPod using the slogan "Think differently," I checked up on Apple slogans and found that "Think different" was a 90s slogan used for various Apple Macintoshes.

It took ages to draw up a pattern that included the words positioned correctly, and it's harder than you think to turn the image from the back of a laptop into a lookalike pattern on graph paper. Sheets of paper later, I had an apple with a bite missing, 'iHat' in a font that looked like the one Apple uses, and the words 'Think different' spaced across the back of the hat on alternating lines so they matched up when knit in the round. 

If you made it through that boring and wordy explanation of yet another knitting process, here's your reward! Pictures of the completed hat, that my dad chooses to roll up slightly and as a result looks like just Turkish men with their non-ear-covering headwear.

Some Money on the Side?

An advertisement showed up on mylifeisaverage.com, a website I often read when I'm bored. It was an ad for an online shop that looked like it had some cute things, so I went to the site. It had a lot of great (but EXPENSIVE!) trinkets and jewelry that were exactly my style, but the things that caught my eye were these two scarves.

They are pretty cool, right? Crocheted pears, knit watermelon, really unique! They even have real pear and watermelon seeds handsewn on to add to the authenticity. However, you will be amazed when you hear the price- for the pears, $150, for the watermelon, $120. SERIOUSLY? Neither scarf is very intricate and a high beginning knitter or crocheter could make them. I don't know anyone who would pay that much for a scarf, but the pear one is sold out so someone found it reasonably priced! Seeing how much money knitters can make for fairly simple things made me see that I have a money-making skill I hadn't realized before.

There's a website, etsy.com, where crafters sell their homemade items, so my plan for the next months is to figure out how registration and all that works and to start making money knitting too. My speciality for now seems animal-themed hats... your choice of color and animal and you'll get a personal, one-of-a-kind fashion statement! $50, any takers?!?

(Just kidding, that is ridiculous, I would think that $15 or so is reasonable... how much do you think people would pay?)

A Penguin Hat

I started knitting again, which has made my life significantly better. I made a hat for Mike and a hat for myself a few months ago:

I decided to start on something a bit more creative. Mike's favourite animal is a penguin, so I wanted to make him a penguin hat. I found a pattern online for a kid's penguin hat, but I didn't think it was very cute. So I used this basic hat pattern and drew up my own penguin chart. I looked a some penguin clip art and combined it with the kid's hat pattern, and this is what I ended up with:

Here are pictures of the hat partway finished and then the final product. Maybe I'll start my own animal hat business, would you buy one with the animal of your choice for $10? (And to think, my dad says I need to go to grad school and become a linguistics professor.) I'll make my living as a travelling animal hat knitter!