It's time

There's been a snafu in the October's Hat Trix pattern and yarn pairing. Again.

This month's random pattern to be drawn out of my bag o' hat trix is Danielle (Ravlink), which I - for reasons which now completely elude me - had chosen to pair with The Knittery's 4-ply merino sock (Ravlink), now discontinued..

Now, I was actually off to a pretty good start with this month's hat. I drew the "kit" on October 1st and wound the yarn up into a lovely cake right then and there. Feeling good and "totally on top of it", I moved on to other projects, and the yarn and pattern have been sitting happily - and somehow immune to Lori's yarn-chewing tendencies - on my coffee table ever since.

(About Lori's yarn-chewing habit, I think I've figured out why some yarn is irresistible to her while other yarn has all the appeal of a dung beetle: it's the yarn that's actively in use that she's after. Diabolical, I tell you).

Anyhoo, now that we've passed the mid-month point, I figured it might maybe - perhaps! - be time to start thinking about knitting up this month's hat.

That's when I actually READ the pattern (as opposed to just looking at the pretty pictures). Stated gauge is 22 sts to 4 inches using 4.0 mm needles (that's be a 6 for my US readers). Not my preferred gauge for a fingering weight yarn (which is what the pattern calls for), but still doable.

The only problem is that the Knittery yarn is a really, really fine fingering, and all you need to do is LOOK at it to know that it's going to knit up to a fabric as droopy as grandma's cleavage at that gauge.

So what to do? Change the pattern? Change the yarn? Draw another kit with a hefty "screw it" thrown in for good measure?

I admit that I briefly considered option 3. But only very, very briefly. The whole point of this self-imposed hat club is to actually - you know - knit some of the patterns I own with some of the yarn in the stash. Drawing another kit would only be a temporary fix.

The first option was also quite attractive, in that I could potentially justify buying ANOTHER pattern (and maybe even yarn to go with it????) to fill the October hat club slot. Again, the whole point of the club would then be right out the freakin' window with that one...

So I went with option 2: change the yarn. I had a look through the stash, and I'm going to be using.... drumroll please.... mystery yarn.

I have no idea what this yarn is. I think it's the first EVER sock yarn I ever bought. It's a merino fingering, and I remember being really concerned about having "enough yarn" for a pair of socks, so I thought it would be prudent to buy 2 skeins (each skein is about 450 yards...). I made a pair of socks for my mother with the first skein, and this one's been sitting in the stash every since (probably going on 4 years now).

Your time is up, mystery yarn. Let the hat knitting commence.

Happy Knitting Everyone!