Weird Beard Knit.

 If you're my friend on Facebook or Ravelry, you will have already seen this hat/beard combo I made for my husband. A couple of days before his birthday my other half requested this. He never asks me to make him things, so I felt kind of obliged. It's about the silliest thing I've ever made. He saved it for a camping trip. We've been out west this past couple of weeks. He wanted to give his family a laugh.

The pattern is available as a free download on Ravelry. I'll warn you that it's not a great pattern. I wouldn't recommend it. There are a few other beard patterns out there that you should probably look at first. I had to restart this several times, and made quite a few adjustment to the pattern. I used Lion Brand wool-ease and held the yarn double and knit on US size 8 needles. It is really dense and therefore very warm.

 My husband thinks it's great. He even went to chase a grizzly bear while wearing it. He came back alive, so maybe it's good for scaring bears. I wouldn't suggest you test that theory though.

Just for a laugh I took a picture of me wearing it too. It's pretty ridiculous. I'll be back with something a little prettier soon.

Manly Socks.

 So when I first moved to the States and married Mr. H, I did not have a job. I got pretty bored. We lived on the outskirts of a small town in Idaho, and we only had one car. This is when I started to knit. At the time I could pretty much only make squares and rectangles, so scarfs were pretty much all I made for years. I made scarfs for all my family, except my other half. He has always told me not to make him one. Even when I started branching out to other knitted items a few years back, he didn't want me to knit him anything. For me giving hand knitted items as gifts is really my way of saying I love you. The fact that my own husband had none of that love was pretty weird! Now we live in a great house, which my husband works out of his home office in our bacement. It gets pretty cold down there in the winter and he is always complaining that his feet are cold. So I decided it was time I tackled hand knit socks. For the first time in our life together, he agreed to me knitting him something. Horay!

I used this pattern called Thuja from http://www.knitty.com/. They are knitted up in Berroco Vintage in boring, manly, black. I got a little help with my sock knitting by reading Getting Started knitting Socks by Ann Budd. I was at my local library and I got chatting with a lady knitting socks, she recomended this book to me. I'm so glad she did. If you are thinking of knitting your first pair of socks I would check it out. I also had a friend from my knitting group to show me how to knit majic loop. So this was a project of firsts for me.

 I finished them up on Valentines day, and I'm so glad I did. I'd been afraid of knitting socks for so long. My Mum had kind of put me off by telling me turning the heal would be too hard. I think I'm going to have to get her to try socks now. I'm looking forward to knitting more socks soon.

Manly Apron

 My husband might kill me for this first picture. He hates it, but I don't care. I do pretty much all the cooking in our home, and I'm pretty cool with that. But there are some things, being a vegetarian, I won't handle. So around all the major Holidays, and whenever he wants bacon, my other half is forced to don an apron and get to work in the kitchen.

I finally got sick of him wearing my apron and decided it was time for him to have his own. I picked up another apron pattern from JoAnns when they were on sale for a dollar and got to work.

I think he had already put the lamb to cook when he opened this on Christmas, but there will always be another opportunity to put it to use.