Miss Dashwood is coming along nicely - I spent a couple days ‘in fear’ of the bobble border and decided to wait until I could dedicate a good chunk of time working through those two rows (rows 3 & 4 - the ones that actually make the bobbles). Today was that day. I don’t remember if I’ve ranted about the needles I’m using - they’re an eBay win. The package they were in says they were made by Boye. Dang, the tips on them are pointy! (I’m quite used to my Susan Bates that are stuck in the HP scarf - they have a nicely tapered blunt tip that doesn’t hurt nearly as much while fighting with stitches).

So as mentioned, I started the border section a couple days ago. I tried using the tip to use a crochet hook to work the K4tbl as mentioned on the Knittyboard - not sure if I worked the stitches in the right direction, but it did work out quite nicely!

So today I finally decided to tackle my bobble rows. Boy was that a pain. The 29″ needle isn’t quite the right length once you get all those decreases in, so it was a little awkward working the stitches around. I made a small mistake somewhere in the previous rows so that one of the little sections was short a stitch - the bobble rows were easy enough to figure the ‘pattern’ out that I could fake the mistake and have it turn out with the bobbles in the right place, so I feel kind of smart for figuring that out and having it turn out successfully on all 4 rows without having actually marked the spot. (I was not in the mood to frog the k4tbl row and redo it all). So yeah, the bobbles worked themselves out, but man is it a PITA trying to purl 4 together! The first stitch liked to jump off the needle while trying to get the 4th stitch on, then I’d lose the ‘working yarn’ trying to pull it thru all four loops. AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I knew there was a reason I didn’t want to knit bobbles into things. (Although they will look quite cute in this hat, I’m sure.) Aside from the pain it is to knit them (frustration, and jabbed fingertips with these particular needles), I’m not really a fan of them. I suppose they have their place, but I will be happy to not knit them into anything else for awhile (unless I make another one of these hats…)

so, the bobbles are done, and they turned out ok. some are a bit larger or better defined than others, but I’m ok with that. it matches the unevenness of the picot edge (which has the same size/definition issues). I knit one round of the stockinette (thank you Knittyboard members for the reminder to not skip these 2″ section), and think I have an extra stitch. that or I can’t count. oh, well - we’ll just decrease it later. I think I’m going to be switching to dpns when I start up again (tomorrow, after my fingertips recover) and see if it ‘flows’ better than it is currently. Hopefully there’s not too many stitches for it to fit on them properly and not fall off…