Knitting as contact sport

So, in light of the Yarn Harlot's recent surprise, I figure it's time to fess up what I did over the weekend.

(And I figure it'd be nice to actually produce some content for this poor little blog, especially since we've somehow misplaced the digital camera. Which is only fitting, as we just moved it from its somewhat precarious home of "sitting in a CD cubby on the desk, completely unprotected" into a nice padded camera bag. And so now, of course, bag and camera have vanished into thin air.)

So Friday night, I finally finished the hat I've been making for our friends' daughter, whose birthday party was yesterday. I'd swatched, and swatched, and swatched again, and even though I was using relatively thin yarn (KnitPicks Shine) and size 3 needles I was still getting a whopping 4 sts/in. But I went with it, used my handy Knitter's Book of Patterns by Ann Budd, and so knitted up this hat, confident that at last I had this stupid yarn figured out.

Nothing doing.

When I pulled the thing off the needles and put it on Ben's head (his being slightly larger than Henry's), it was a bit too tight. And since our friends' daughter is almost a year older than the boys, I was sure it would be too small for her.

Great. It's late Friday and I need to be ready with a hat by Sunday at 2 p.m. I get the kids to sleep and mid-nursing, I figure it out. I will take some of the KnitPicks Merino Style I bought ages ago to make a skull illusion scarf for a friend of mine, work it tripled and make a somewhat smaller "Fat Hat" out of Hip to Knit. Except I don't actually own H2K, so I need to go out to the library on Saturday and hope it's there, or else just finally buy the darn thing.

Well, Saturday afternoon rolls around, Caz goes out to run some errands, among them looking for H2K at either the library or the book store, I don't care which. He brings a copy of H2K home for my very own to keep forever and ever, and once he gets the kids safely corraled and focused on eating dinner, I start knitting.

I cannot explain why I thought this moss-stitch-and-cables hat would only take me two hours, except that's what I thought it took me when I made two of them over Christmas for various gift-recipients. Obviously, it must have taken me much longer, because I was working on that baby until 5 a.m., then went to bed, woke up at 11 a.m. and got going again. I finished it in time for Caz to leave with the boys at 2:30 (that's right, half an hour late) and I wound up going back to bed, as I'd not even had time to shower in all the hubbub. To be fair, I think it was mostly the damn pompom that slowed me down at the end.

At least the reports coming back say that our friends' daughter /adored/ the hat, to the point of wearing it practically all the time, except when she took it off to try to jam it onto her father's obviously much-larger head.

So there's my little tale of hard-core knitting, and we're not even going to discuss that I started writing this post on September 26. Not one bit.

I am also, btw, not actually admitting I have a knit-blog, even though I have at least now found the damned digital camera, so perhaps I can take pictures of some of the things I've got on the needles and my one big-news FO which I will have to post about... soon. By which I mean (or would mean, if I had a knit-blog) November.