Let’s talk a bit about what went wrong with the yarn.

Reminder, I won’t be saying who it’s by, because that would be a dick move. But I will talk about what happened because I need to get some use out of the time I spent knitting (using it for content helps with that) and because it’s nice to see that everything doesn’t always go right.

I bought two balls of this because I’d planned to knit two versions of the hat.

Before I cast on, I cut a bit off each end, soaked the bits in slightly soapy water, laid the yarn between two paper towels, set something heavy on it, and left for a few hours. This is how I test for color fastness, and there was absolutely no color on the paper towels.

When I finished the hat, I tossed it in the sink to soak. I returned a few minutes later to a sink full of Kool Aid. I grumbled a bit but figured fine, this happens sometimes, it’s fixable.

I drained the water and filled the sink again, this time adding a bit of synthrapol (a detergent that helps keep loose dye in the water so it goes down the drain & doesn’t end up back on your fabric) to the water. Kool Aid sink again. So I tried third time. And a fourth. Still Kool Aid.

So I decided fine, I don’t really care if the colors on my hat run, it’s not like it’s going to get washed all that often, and put it on a head form to dry.

But when it dried the colors were much less vibrant and kinda muddy. The orange had gone almost white in spots, and the purple had turned kinda muddy.

Worse yet, the fabric itself was looking rough. There was a distinct halo where bits of the fiber had worked their way free from the yarn (those bits are the precursor to pills). It looked like it had spent a season or two getting pulled in and out of a coat pocket before it had been worn at all (remember all I’d done is knit it and let it soak in the sink with a few water changes).

At this point I was pretty cranky, so it went to time out while I thought about what to do next.

A few days later, I pulled the second ball out to take a look at it, and that’s when I knew this hat in this yarn was not destined to be in the pattern. We’ll pick back up there when we rejoin the saga.