I finished the second Coronet over the weekend.  I had been aiming for a smaller, more child-sized version, and this one is smaller, but not by very much.  I did 15 repeats of the cable pattern and wound up picking up 80 stitches to work the body of the hat.  Perhaps 14 or 13 repeats would have been better?  It didn’t come out badly…

...just not quite as much smaller as I had thought it would be.

The cable and the top-knot are the very last of the Come Sail Away yarn.  In fact, this is all that was left:

And I did, finally (!) finish fiddling around with the Circle Jacket.  It got plain, braided ties because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.  Actually, I had pulled some quartz and dyed howlite beads (blue, of course) out of my old beading stash thinking they would be pretty and interesting on the tie ends.  And then it occurred to me that sending stone beads through the washing machine would probably not be good for them :)  So, since I do want the sweater to remain washable, I wound up with plain old braided ties.  Should something better come along, they will be easy enough to replace.

This is quite an old-fashioned look and I really like it.  In the comments to Friday’s post, Charlotte recommended washing the sweater first and seeing how that worked to relax the fabric.  If that didn’t do the trick, then I could try the boiling water trick.  That was a good thought and that’s exactly what I did, though I washed in fairly hot water - not so hot that you couldn’t put your hands in it, but almost.  And that worked very nicely indeed :)  The collar uncurled and the shells relaxed and lined up perfectly.

I really like the look of this.  It is very graceful - and I need all the help I can get in that area :)  I’m very tempted to try another one in another (or a couple of other) colors.  Given the way the body and sleeves lengthened after the washing, I’d have to rethink the notion of adding more rows to the body.  I was certain that I would want to make future versions of this sweater longer but now, after the blocking (heheh…), I’m not so sure.

The cats are in full sun-seeking mode as the temperatures have been down in the 40s every morning for a week and we’re expecting our first hard frost almost any time now.  I’m really hoping that will put paid to the allergy stuff which has been particularly annoying this past summer.  It would be nice not to have a park a tissue on my upper lip to catch the constant drips and I could do with out the sinus pressure and headaches too :)

But it is a beautiful morning out there and I’m going to make a foray to the supermarket in a little while.  I love the sunshine (Myria has hazarded the opinion that I’m solar-powered) and sunshine is sunshine, allergy-laden or not :)

Happy Monday!