Harry Potter style scarf and hat

My 4 year old nephew has been really interested in my knitting and spinning recently and asked me to make him a scarf when he saw all my yarn.  So, I made him this scarf in the style of Harry Potter.  I wanted to have something to give to his brother so I whipped up this hat in a few hours one evening and the following morning.

I've been reflecting on my knitting progress recently.  Back in February of 2010 (almost 2 years ago!) I posted in this post about how I just didn't like knitting that much but that I really wanted to get over the learning curve so I could get into it.  Well, I think it worked!  I'm totally addicted now.  I've even been teaching others to knit and have been able to help them trouble-shoot.  That was a real eye-opener to me that I had transitioned from a novice to someone who actually knows how to knit!  I made both this hat and scarf without any pattern. Now, the scarf is not that tricky, but the hat required me to make ear-flaps and attach them to the hat, decrease, and pick up stitches around the bottom to do the ribbing.  Not to mention figuring out my gauge and how many stitches to cast on.  All that which was foreign to me less than two years ago now seems easy!

It really just took some practice and making a few things from patterns to learn some techniques.  Some other things that have helped me in the process have been the book Knit Fix, which has some really good explanations of both how to fix mistakes and also how to avoid making those same mistakes again (or in the first place).  The other thing that has really helped and inspired me is the Knit Picks podcast. Kelley talks about a lot of techniques and makes them sound easy or explains why you would use them.  I don't necessarily learn how to do the techniques while I'm listening, but at least I know they exist so I could look them up if I wanted to use that technique.  Sometimes it  helps me to better understand techniques I already knew about.  She also reviews a lot of books and my library has expanded because of that.  In fact, I think that is where I heard about Knit Fix!