New Year, New Patterns!

Happy New Year!
   Love that word New!  This year there will be many New things in store for me but the first ones are patterns.  During December, the patterns just flew out of me and probably that was due to gift giving!  I love to give, so it inspires me to create new things.  I love combining different colors and textures and I love the way a good combo feels when it is done almost as much as seeing happy smiling faces when I give something homemade to someone who just loves it!
   My best friend, Geniene, got the first gift this year--Crazy New Years Hat!  She really likes pink so I combined it with black and purple and a little sandstone funfur to make this new design.  I never know what my designs will look like, of course, until they are finished.  It was the same for the Crazy Hat.  At one point, I was sure that I would be ripping rows, but it turned out great and she Loves it!

The next design was for myself.  I was inspired by Geniene's hat but not by the pink(not a pretty in pink girl here), so I started out with some royal blue, taupe, funfur again, espresso brown and nubby green.  
This time I actually drew out a design on paper before starting.  I played around some more with alternating stitches like the one I call notching.  This is doing one stitch through the top back thread only and the next through both top threads in stitch.  This I keep doing the whole row.   On Geniene's hat you can see this when you look at the second row of pink.  You can also see it in the black row right below that second row of pink.  Here is a pic of my hat with matching set of gloves:

I usually like patterns as in symmetry but sometimes I like to shake things up a bit. With my hat---> I made it symmetrical but the stripes in Geniene's hat are purple-funfur-purple, and then funfur-purple-funfur.

On both hats, instead of a pompom or nothing at all, I put a tassel and I doubled up the yarns to make it so it wouldn't look so droopy.  Here is a closeup of the glove.  I used the same design I had used in the hat but abbreviated it slightly at the fingers so I could fit in the last rows and end in the funfur.  On the design for my hat and gloves, I originally was going to make the stripe with brown-green-brown but it didn't look good until I added the blue in the middle of the green.  The blue made the green look like blue-green and I liked that effect more.  For those of you wondering, the funfur is not itchy and it doesn't bother me to have it on my fingers either.  The whole hat and glove set feel soft and warm.  Can't wait to wear them tomorrow to take the kids to school !  We don't get that many really cold days in Florida so I enjoy wearing my things when it does get cold!