Happy Surprises and a Pirate Hat

So, I'm just finishing the second fair isle hat, and I plan to be done my husbands' beehive hat very soon. I only have to do the sewn cast-off for the fair isle, and I've already switched to DPNs to finish the last few rings of the beehive hat. I'm not sure if I will have to start on a new ball of yarn or not, but I figure I can dip into the blue-and-olive leftovers from the fair isle if I need a bit more Noro to finish the beehive.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about the pink Odessa, I've wound all the yarn and it's sitting around in a knittable state, too.

However, when all's said and done, it's really time to start a new hat. This time it's going to be Amy King's Fake Isle Hat, with Gretchen's pirate modifications. (You must click on the link to Gretchen's hat. It really is beautiful.)

Something really cool happened with regard to that. I went looking for some Bernat Lana that I knew I had, because I had decided on a natural colourway for the non-Noro bit.



But when I opened the bin it was in, right at the top was a ball of Patons Classic Wool in Winter White that I didn't even remember I had! Looks like one of my famous Len's Mill bargains. (Phyllis, the lady in charge of the yarn section at our local Len's -- I just found out recently her name is Phyllis -- sometimes puts odd balls in baskets at the side of the aisle when she doesn't have room on the shelves. I troll those baskets looking for Patons Classic Wool for one or two dollars off the regular price.) Anyway, I'd rather use up easily obtainable Classic Wool than discontinued Lana for this project.

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In other news, I finished the book, Cast On, Bet's Off this morning. I'm glad I persevered. Great surprise ending! Anyway, I know I had mixed feelings about the amount of (what I saw as) unnecessary detail in the descriptive parts of the text, but I now realize that -- at least whenever the author touched on anything to do with knitting -- the detail could also be comforting.

I liked the references to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (who actually "appeared" briefly in the novel), and patterns by Sally Melville (founder of the Knitting Guild to which I belong), and Lucy Neatby (who is distantly associated with Shelridge Farm, where I took my dyeing workshop and found out that the owners are good friends with an ex-coworker of mine).

And I imagine that if I were a rich person who employed live-in help, had a 20' x 22' wine cellar under my house, and drove a Mercedes, I might find other details of the characters' lives comforting, too. (Being a middle-class suburban schmuck as I am, though, I just found those kinds of details alienating.)

Nonetheless I am very grateful to my swap partner. I'd never have known about -- much less read -- this book if it weren't for her.

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I forgot to mention the thrummed mittens class I took last Saturday. It was fun in the sense that there was a lot of camaraderie. Patti from the Knit & Chat was also there. I had mentioned to her about the thrumming class at Shall We Knit, because Patti almost took a class at another LYS which would have been much more expensive. So she was happy to save the money.

But, alas, I found that thrumming is not something I enjoy, and to work so hard for a finished project that really is not something I like either... if I'm honest, it isn't going to happen. So I'll be giving Lyz back the fibre she gave me.