Of hats for my goddaughter

Well.

That hat in the icky acrylic wool blend?  Already ruined.  A pull or something put a hole in it.  That thing was doomed from the start, and I'm pretty sure it was just to spite me, considering what I said about its yarn before.

--not that I'm self-centered--

So emergency knitting!  Baby hat!  We interrupt your fun lace knitting to bring you an important request . . .

Did I show you that lace?  It's okay.  I'm not thrilled with it, but I don't hate it enough to pull it out.  Yet.  That's for another post.

For the past few days, I've been attempting to get a hat done just right.  At first, I was happily scrolling through patterns on ravelry.  I was thinking something easy and quick, but also warm.  And then the whole yarn issue hit.

This is the baby whose mother actually LIKES acrylic/synthetics.  She likes washable.  She even distrusts superwash, though I'm working on that.

Did I tell you that I prefer natural fibers?  That I hate synthetics?  That I won't pay money for them?  That I hate working with them?

Right.

So into the stash I dove, trying to find something that would be acceptable to both of us.  Something that would be warm.  It's New England, for heaven sakes, and that baby needs a good, tightly-knit warm (wool!!) hat.

There it is.  All balled up again.

I had the perfect thing.  One lone skein of a very baby girl-looking superwash aran.  With little slubby flecks.  Soft, warm, lofty.  Perfect.

I went to work on this pattern, which I've worked before and honestly?  Never loved it.  But I got it into my mind that it would be perfect with this perfect yarn that had been just waiting for this particular moment in time.

The gauge was wrong on attempt one.  The length was wrong on attempt two.  And thus, the yarn is rewound and back in the stash.  What can I do with 80 yards of soft, warm, lofty, very baby girl-looking superwash aran with little slubby flecks?

That, dear friends, is a problem for another day.

Onto the next disaster.

The only other acceptable yarn I could see was this crap.

Superwash, and I had a few different colorways.

What can I say?  There was a sale at WEBS and I was lured in.

I thought this cute pattern might hide the yarn's inherent flaws.  And it would be warm with all that stranding.  And stranding is fun.

Holy cow.  It did not hide any of the yarn's flaws: it accentuated them.

Bulky at one point, fingering a few inches later

You see, this yarn is spun thick-thin.  Now the only reason I can imagine you would want to knit with this yarn is because you want your stitches to look uneven.  Stupid.  Ugly.

Isn't that what we all aim for when we knit?  Stupid, ugly, uneven stitches?

And when you put those together with stranding, the combination is remarkably . . . wrong.

Terrible picture of terrible knitting

I would have given up at this point and returned to my lace, but my dear goddaughter needs a hat.
So I went once more to the stash (because I knew that I did not have enough crappy acrylic for a stranded hat) and found a wool/acrylic blend that I had been halfway saving and halfway shunning, since I bought it under the impression that it was wool and not synthetic.  When I discovered that it was a Mud-blood? --is that right?--I didn't want it for anything.  $8/skein for a dang wool-blend no better than Wool-ease.  Huh.

And yet I began to think of it for a hat for one of mine, so I was excluding it from possible yarns.

Don't you love how that happens?  You have skeins and skeins of yarn in the stash that are off-limits because you've envisioned them for projects that get pushed aside time and time again.  And when it comes to using them for something else, you actually feel a little twinge, and you hesitate.  Well, I hesitated for half a minute before realizing that I wouldn't be dropping any more cash on crappy synthetic yarn.  I settled on my pattern--and here is an admission--that took a few tries, too--I wanted earflaps and cables and something that would knit quickly.  Too much time wasted already!

The one I actually finished

I landed on this one, which I have knit before, and I worked up some earflaps.  Check my ravelry details for notes on how to do those.

A little pom, some braided ties, and less than 24 hours.  Perfect.

I even kind of like this wool blend, which feels more wool than synthetic.  It knit up nicely and only squeaked a little when I was weaving in ends.

I tried to get Henry to model--

--but he was really not amused