[d] enclosed in brackets

After my last post about the beard hat, I realized that I didn't explain how I would go about getting one of these hats without forking out $135 for one.

About a year and a half ago, I started learning how to knit. For the one person out there who doesn't know, read up on knitting on Wikipedia (actually, there's some good stuff even if you *do* know about knitting). I had wanted to learn how for a while, and my mother-in-law taught me over vacation. She let me borrow some needles and bought me some "starter" yarn - now I have a few pairs of needles and some yarn of my own, but I would love to get a set of circular needles like the picture here.

So far the only "real" things I've made are a hat and a small scarf (pictures coming soon). The hat was made from a pattern (update: I found it), and was done up on size 8 US straight needles. It was going to be for my wife (K), but ended up being for my son. There's another hat in the works that'll be for K, and it should be done soon.

Next steps to getting that sweet, sweet hat going:

• Figure out the pattern (gonna get some help on that one)
• Get the right needles (circulars or straights?), probably around size 10 US
• Get some good yarn. I've seen some that would be perfect for it, but I have to find it again.

There's a ton of resources if you want to know how to knit, including geeky patterns, like the klein bottle hat and the DNA hat (the link I had is broken). You could ask me too, but I'm still pretty close to "just starting" as far as experience goes.