It seems only fair to balance out the Absurdly Tiny Yarn with some Absurdly Giant Yarn. Something about moderation. Or balance. Or maybe unity?  I'm sure there's an inspirational quote to be had in there somewhere. You work on finding it, I'll work on these.  We'll meet back here in a bit and compare notes.

So normally I'm a sucker for texture. Give me cables. Give me lace. Give me a stitch pattern that swoops this way and that and does no end of interesting things.  But today?  Today I sort of just want to let this brim stand there and steal the show. Now I know this is uncharacteristic restraint.  And don't worry, I'm sure it won't last.  But somehow, this just works. Well, ok, I did give in and add one little flourish.  Because a bit of fancy business on a hat crown is just the natural order of things.  But otherwise, this [...]

This is fine. Size 0 needles. Super skinny, super slippery yarn. Totally absurd final product.  It's all totally fine.

Look, sometimes you have a wild notion, go to bed ruminating on it, wake up still ruminating on it, realize you have precisely zero suitable yarn, and then find yourself in the car on the way to the yarn store. It happens.  I mean not too often, but from time to time. This will either be glorious or end in tears and despair.  Either way it should be fun. Yarns are from Halcyon, click the picture to go to their listings!

See...it all works out fine in the end. I just needed one nice long (ahem, knot free) stretch at the end for the body of the hat. And yes, this (and the gray one with the star on top) will both show up in a pattern (think next week assuming I don't get hit by lightning or fall off a cliff between now and then). Now if you'll excuse me, I need to knit some mitts to go with it.  Because there's yarn left, and I'm not ready to be done with these.  

So after the knot the other day, I wound up all the rest of the yarn to make sure I wouldn't hit that problem again (insert lecture about this being one of the many benefits of winding your yarn before you start your project, a lecture I apparently need to give myself). I found the longest stretch of good yarn (I had a couple of different skeins to check) and declared it would be for the body of the hat. And the shorter pieces would be fine for the matching mitts. So it will be fine. There's no actual particular [...]

Ok, so no one likes knots. But most of the time, they're just a small irritation. However, on long color change yarns, they can actually be sort of a problem.⁠ See how the yarn on one side is blue? And the yarn on the other side is white? Yeah. Not cool. If the color transition had continued smoothly across the knot, it wouldn't have been a big deal. I'd have just left enough yarn to weave in the ends and kept knitting. But because the color changes from one strand to the next, that would be hugely jarring. Instead of [...]

Remember this lovely thing from way back in December? Back before the holidays beat you up and took your lunch money? Back before the mending project distracted me for a solid week? Back before I got infatuated with tiny envelopes and had to knit a whole post office full of them? Yeah, well I didn't forget about it. In fact, I knit a second iteration of it (this time in something not the color of week old snow on a cloudy day).  And I shall be bombarding you with it for the next little while, because it's rather fetching!   [...]