I-cord, you cord, we all cord

I have learned to i-cord.

I'm making the Official Kittyville Hat. It was supposed to be a Christmas gift for my sister in law but I didn't even start it until well after the holidays.

I'm working in red and black - the band, ear flaps, i-cord, and inner ears in red, the upper hat and outer ears in black. The pom poms will be in both red and black.

The yarn is gorgeous. I picked up some Cascade Cloud 9 at the Yarntopia after-the-holidays sale. As soon as I picked it up, I knew I had to buy the yarn. It's so very, very soft. Think kitten fur soft. I walked around the store petting it before I bought any. *blush* No project in mind. Then I decided it would be perfect for the planned Kittyville Hat for my beloved sis-in-law.

Of course, everything went wrong.
The gauge was slightly off despite using a similar weight and the same needle size as the pattern called for, and I ended up adding stitches to the band (the seed stitch part) to make it fit. The band went decently, only cast on three times I think before I managed to finish seed stitching. But then, the hat part didn't want to come together right. I got as far as binding off twice, and both times had to frog it somewhat, once down to the band. When I got to the bind off the third time, I decided to just fix the two slipped stitches rather than frogging it again. Fortunately the pattern calls for a very long tail. ;)

So band and dome done, I started on the ears. First one went pretty quickly, though I was pretty sure I was doing it wrong the whole time. Finished and had to hit YouTube to find a video to teach me how to i-cord, for the ties.

The first video seemed straight forward enough but when I went to do it, to knit the i-cord, it didn't quite work. I re-did the search and a different video came up first, even with the same search ("how to knit icord"). This one was by Bridget from the East Side and is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ0s_2TBwCQ.

I had an ah-ha moment! After that, the i-cord went swiftly. I replayed the end of the video when it came time to do the bind off. I debated leaving it un-bound, just having the tail dangling, until I did the pom pom, but wanted to see if the bind off worked. It did!

Second ear flap took a bit more time. I found that it didn't narrow as swiftly as the first. Since I'd already done that i-cord, I decided to just do the second ear to match, rather than trying to figure out how to frog i-cord.

The second ear flap is finished now, and I'm working on that i-cord. Once that's at 12 inches, I can do the ears.