Someone needs to address the whole 'my favorite hats are all fingering weight...fingering weight hats take forever to knit' problem. I suspect the solution is for me to develop more patience.  Or for me to learn to love chunky hats more.  But so far neither of those have come to pass. And so on I go...teeny tiny stitch after teeny tiny stitch.  This is why I don't knit sweaters.  Someone sneak in and finish this up while I'm napping. There's hand sanitizer on the counter by the door.

Ahem. I am very glad I swapped yarns. Don't get me wrong, the other yarns were lovely. I'm happy to have them in the stash.  I will doubtless use them in future projects.  Just not together. But these? These belong together. Now the only problem is that fingering weight hats take For Ever.

Pssst, mailing list folks, go check your email... This is what happens when you finally acknowledge that every time you knit a cable, you secretly want to take a marker to some of the strands and color them in. Now let me say up front that you shouldn't do that. It goes poorly. Very poorly.  The idea is good...but you need to do it with yarn instead of markers.  And Interlock shows you how to do exactly that. All you're doing is holding a contrast yarn alongside your regular yarn for some of your stitches.  No really, that's all there [...]

See? That's much better (where better is defined as 'more to my liking,' I get that it's subjective). That is making the part of my brain that likes speckles and soft things and somehow gloomy-but-luminous things very very very happy. I pretty much never regret ripping if the yarn isn't quite right.  In fact, I pretty much always regret not ripping if the yarn isn't quite right. And yes, normally the swatch is enough to tell.  But every now and then it isn't. But in this case, the new pairing is an absolute delight, and I'm so glad I switched! [...]

Remember how I said I had more yarn?  That's because the good folks at A Very For Keeping Warm are still shipping yarn right now, and they had something irresistible to round out my floof collection. And I'm pretty darn sure that yellow one was the shade I actually needed to pair with that purple in the hat I just ripped.  But I've also been knocked right down dead by this pairing with the dark orange, so the purple and yellow might have to wait a bit. Don't worry though, I have a feeling I'll come back to it in [...]

This was supposed to work. These two were supposed to look all delightfully dramatic and high contrast and zippy. And they almost do.  Almost.  But in the fabric, the yellow is just a little too green. And the yellow bits on the purple yarn are just a little too peachy. And the whole thing looks a tiny bit muddled. And the yarns are too good on their own (and the pattern idea too good on its own) to doom them to a not-quite-right pairing.  So I'm going to rip it. But never fear.  I have obtained more yarn.  This will [...]

I've given this spiel before, but yes, yes I do generally cast on over two needles (at least for the long tail cast on).⁠ Now, I see a few of you out there warming up your fingers right now to send me impassioned lectures about how this is bad and wrong and will bring about the downfall of society as we know it. Please don't.⁠ I'm not doing it this way to make my cast on stretchier or looser. The type of cast on you pick mostly determines how stretchy it is. The amount of space between your cast on [...]

I'm thinking about what I want to do next. The answer of late is 'something soft...something soft and fluffy and bright, and don't you dare try and make me feel bad about it.' ⁠So i figured I'd do a floof census and see what my choices are. ⁠ ⁠ Somehow the colors I grab in floof are So Much More Saturated than the other things in my stash (if you wander back to mid January, you'll see a picture of the whole stash laid out, it's mostly the color of rocks, wet rocks, or lichen covered rocks).  Luckily brightly colored [...]

So, there's this thing that sometimes happens where the easily distracted part of my brain says 'hey, what would happen if we tweaked this one little bit?' And the ever so much more practical part of my brain has to come along and say 'nope, make a decision and stick to it.'  And usually the practical big wins.  But occasionally the distractable part makes a convincing enough case that it's worth indulging, just a little. And the whole time I was knitting this, the distractable part of my brain kept hopping up and down and saying more colors More Colors [...]