No. More. Hats!

First things first: Thanks for all the kind words and support. Yesterday was a really, really rotten day for all of us. Today was better! But yesterday sucked lumpy moose piss through a straw. I was only partly kidding when I threatened to run away and join the circus…

ANYWAY.

I am done with the July shower-knitting for the preemies in Texas. I didn’t quite make my hat quota: I ended up with 29 hats, 4 preemie blankets, one sweater set (sweater, hat and booties) and one lonely little pair of booties. (Hello, we are a pair of cute pink booties, and although we are truly adorable we are also the only pair in the box and we feel a little like a third wheel amidst all these hats and blankets…)

I am almost giddy with relief at being done with the hat-fest. Don’t get me wrong, I love knitting for babies and all, but by the end of the month, having done little else except preemie hats, I was really getting particularly tired of wee little hats. When I finished the last hat yesterday, I had a moment of saying to myself, “Still short two…one if you count the one in the sweater set…” and thinking that if I stayed up late I could probably do at least one more…

And then? I yelled, “CLOSE ENOUGH!!” and threw them into the washing machine with a scoop of Dreft and collapsed on the couch fanning myself wildly with my Mother Bear pattern. Which is probably going to be my next insane “overly focused” thing that I’ll be whining about being sick of doing BUT that’s another insanity for another day.

Done. Done, done and done. No more preemie hats (or other insanely focused ordeals) for a little while around here, thank.you!

I picked Siv back up and worked on it for a while with extremely good humor. Oh yeah. Feelin’ the love for the not-a-hat project…

And then, it dawned on me that I will be running out of yarn before I finish it.

@*^&@.

This pattern? Cursed. There can be no other explanation for the amount of trouble I have had with this danged sweater. Someone put a hex on the whole project.

The pattern called for seven skeins, I bought eight, and I have already gone through two full skeins and the better part of the third and am about 95% sure I will be tying on a fourth before I cast off the back.

Unless there is some kind of worm-hole technique revealed further on in the instructions that I have somehow overlooked, the sleeves will not be happening on this sweater. I’m trying to envision what this sweater would look like with a ‘vest’ treatment, and it is not giving joy unto my soul. It is making me pull faces that remind me of Eldest expressing her displeasure with lima bean casserole.

I shall have to make some kind of adjustment, probably make it a short(er) sleeved sweater or…something. I have a vague idea around making a very short sleeve with a single repeat of the knotwork pattern, but it is only a vague idea and no matter how hard I squint it doesn’t come into sharper focus right now.

It irks me. I shall now be shoving Siv under the couch and denying it exists for a while.

So now in a truly foul mood, I stomped over to my stash and did the “I have nothing to knit!” dance in front of it for a little while. And by ‘a little while’ I mean ‘so long that we were a hair late to gymnastics tonight’. See, I have a lot of @*^&@ing HATS! on the agenda, so a lot of the yarn at the front of the stash is set aside for HATS, and I was going to give up knitting for good before I did another hat right now.

Eventually, I pulled out a skein of Schaefer Anne, a handpainted wool / mohair / nylon blend, which pleased me. If I hadn’t mislaid the camera (again), I’d show you, but instead I’m just going to have to tell you that it is mostly white with significant splashings of brown, rust, gray and slate blue. When I find the camera again (sigh), I’ll take a picture and get it up on the sidebar.

It being a skein, I had to get out the swift and ball winder to get it ready to use. I was so pissed about Siv at the time that I wound the ball very, very tightly.

How tightly?

I think if I threw this at the window, I might break it.

Stupid Siv!

So I sat at gymnastics today while my three girls tumbled and romped and bounced, ensconced in my cheap $7 camping chair (the banquet chairs they provide are OK if you’re just perching for a few minutes at pickup or drop off, but for the 2.5 hours that I’m parked there they are hell), starting a sock for my man.

After her session, Eldest plonked down next to me and said, “Oh, whatcha makin’, another hat?”

“No!” I sang out gladly. “Actually? It’s a sock for daddy!!”

“Oh,” she looked delighted for me, then said brightly, “…but it looks just like one of the hats!”

OK, well, I’ll give you that at the time it looked a lot like one of the hats. Two circular needles, round thing on them, ribbing – that’s how the hats all started too.

But these? These are socks. Which is different from a hat. Because, uh, well because. They just are. For one thing, unlike the hats, which are done at about 4.5”, these keep going for 9”, then turn a heel, and then they go for another 9”, and then they have a toe decrease and a fidgety seaming technique called Kitchener stitch.

Hmm.

Well, I ain’t sayin’ it makes sense, necessarily.

They just aren’t another hat, and this makes me extremely happy.