Birthday Pie, Monday Sky

Sunday was my husband's birthday, so I baked him a pie from some of the blackberries I canned in July.

The piecrust didn't seal successfully, so it bubbled all around the edge. But my great-grandfather used to say, "A fruit pie should boil over in the oven," so if that's true, I guess this pie is a success.


I keep thinking "I wish I had the camera!" as I drive around in the snow. Some of the wind-sculpted drifts over the edges of the drainage ditches are spectacular.

The driving conditions were not exactly spectacular when I finally remembered the camera this morning. I saw one car off the road in about five miles of driving, and my husband counted six!

The winter-morning sky was spectacular, though.


This tiny little creek runs down the drainage ditch that goes along our road and under our driveway. It hasn't been cleared for several years and has started to meander. It runs all year around, even in dry droughty July. One January, I had a great blue heron fly out of it and over my car!

I tried to think of something rhyming with "pie" and "sky" that pertained to hats or knitting, but came up empty.

This hat is double-knitted using the same four-stitch pattern as the blue waffle scarf (*K1, P1, slip one with yarn in back, slip one with yarn in front*, repeat). In order to keep knitting in the same pattern around and around, the stitch count must be either "any odd number x 2" or "any multiple of 4, plus 2 stitches".

If you think of knitting in the round on three needles with 14 stitches (14=7x2, or 12+2), arranged 4-4-6, on the first two needles, you have one repeat of the pattern. But on the third needle, you have one and a half. So when you get back to the first needle, you end up slipping the stitches you knitted and purled in the first round, and knitting or purling the ones you slipped.

My difficulty came when I wanted to decrease. I knew I had to keep knitting "any odd number x 2" to stay in pattern and not end up with a single-layered spot in the double-layered hat. Eventually I figured out that if I rearranged 8 stitches into "K K, P P, K K, P P" order, then followed the pattern as "knit 2 together, purl 2 together, slip 2 with yarn in back, slip 2 with yarn in front", and remembered to k2tog. and purl2tog. on the next round when I came to those paired slipped stitches, I would decrease by 2 stitches per round, one on the outer layer, and one on the inner layer.

If you look carefully below the junction of the gold and pink needles, you can just see two columns of stitches merging.

I should also point out that although this hat has two knitted surfaces, the two layers interlock at every stitch, so it does not pull open into a shape like two hats grafted together at the brim.