I survived!

It wasn't as scary as I was fearing.  The 12 hour day followed by the 11 hour day sure was tough though.  I'm very, very glad I won't be doing that again anytime soon.

I'm more than half-way done with the scarf thing that will become a hat.  I like the idea of it a lot.  Though the stockinet areas are curling really badly, I hope they will block out.  As I've been knitting I've been playing around with the idea of treating the pattern as a base and doing something fun with it.  Instead of large amounts of stockinet I was thinking of adding a lace.  Since I wouldn't want the lace to look odd I had to do a bit of fiddling with it in my head.  You couldn't use a pattern with too many stiches because the gaps in the pattern, where you add or take away four stitches) are near the top and would be noticeable.  While some people might not care, this was not the look I was hoping for.
Most of the time when you are adding more ribbed areas or taking away, you are changing the stockinet area by four.  Though you wouldn't be able to just use a pattern with four stitched across without having two plain ones on the end.  So here is my idea: Use a pattern that is divisible by four stitches, but have one stockinet stich on either side.
For some reason I didn't think it was going to work for a while until I picked up the knitting and just looked at it.  It will work perfectly.  There won't be any awkward stockinet gaps and there won't be this strange band of stockinet on one side.
Here comes the hard part...picking the stich pattern.  I have looked through a bunch and also decided that a lot of them were not what I was looking for.
Here is a list of stitch patterns I have narrowed it down to:

• Elm Grain I like the idea of this one because all the exciting stuff is done on the wrong side
• Star Cluster It has the word star in it and already has the side stitches built in
• Lace Background Seems interesting
• Diagonal Scallop I was thinking of doing a *yo, k2tog* pattern at first and this reminds me of it
• Zigzag Lace 2 This one just looks like a lot of fun

The website I found all of those on is also a very good one.  I am going to have to poke around on it some more.  You can search patterns by stitch count or even use their drop sleeve Gansey sweater pattern maker!  I'm so glad that I got too lazy to look through the tons of books I have for a stitch pattern and checked the internet instead.

Also for anyone who remembered when I was talking about doing writing prompts from the book I bought, don't worry.  I didn't forget about that whole thing!  Since I was given permission to use 32-62 prompts, it got me thinking.  There are 52 weeks in a year, so why don't I do one per week?  That sounded good, then I thought, why not start it on a new year?  This whole blog thing was started on something that was done in a year.  So I hope to start those writing prompts in the (shortly) coming new year.  The fact that I can do up to 62 gives me some wiggle room incase I'm feeling extra writerly.
Now I'm off to go finish the hat.  I can't start the new fancy one until I finish this one (or it will just never get done)