The hat probably doesn’t look all that different in this photo. I ripped back to decrease the diameter, switched to dark brown yarn for the lower half to cut down on noisy color overload, and did a little bit of fiddling to make the points slightly less pointed.

It still looks like a flower. I still love that.

It no longer looks like a Mario Brothers mushroom, and for that I am deeply grateful.

However, I still do not like it on me.

It fits well.

It’s comfortable, and has even gotten fairly good reviews. Branden says it looks like a hippie hat, my neighbor says it’s super cute. Unfortunately, I’m not a hippy, and I am not generally inclined toward cuteness. Even worse, I’m afraid I’m still not a hat person.

We also noted that it must be a good color, as it matches some of our strongest accent pieces in the living room quite nicely.

(Hopefully matching with the decor will make up for the fact that it doesn’t match my sweater today. I had the right sweater on yesterday, and then we didn’t take pictures. Best laid plans and all of that…)

And the hat is warm; we checked.

In short, the hat is perfect, but it’s still not me. I’m going to give it a few days to see if things change. If all else fails, it just screams to be given to my sister; it would absolutely work for her.

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! (Or a great Thursday, if you’re not in the U.S.) We had a perfectly quiet day; just the two of us, a little crafting, a lot of turkey. A good way to celebrate Branden being home.

I promised to show you the yarn I got at the mill, so let’s start there.

My stash is at full capacity right now, so I was working very hard to keep purchases to a minimum. I’ve been watching this yarn for a sweater for a year now, but I also have four sweaters lined up in the queue, and so decided to wait on sweater quantities. Instead, I found these beautiful skeins of laceweight in the sale bin.

Plenty for a large project, and how could you resist that color?

I also bought some of their handpainted yarn, which has a really interesting texture when dyed. It’s 100% wool yarn, and they use the same dye for the solids, but the handpaints all look like chenille when they’re knit up (And the solids don’t). I asked, and they don’t really know why this happens with the handpaints, but I’d love to find out. It’s a completely unique look as far as I know, and I really like it.

This yarn is destined to be a hat. I think I’ve complained here before about the sad fact that I am not a hat person. I can’t recall ever having a hat that I liked, and so I have spent years and years going around with a cold head in the winter. This doesn’t really bother me, but now that it’s getting nippy outside in the mornings, it would be nice to have a hat that I can at least stand to wear on the really cold and windy days.

So, I sat down on Saturday night and cast on for this:

It’s a simple tam style, which I’m completely making up as I go (I’m sure you’re surprised). I love how it turns the handpaint into a flower, and I really like the strong radial lines popping up in the center. As a knitted object, I like it very much. As a hat? As in something I would actually wear on my head? That’s a little harder.

Part of the problem is the color. I love the handpainted look and I definitely want to keep it, but I think there’s just too much of it. When the flower part was small, I was completely in love. As it grew larger, it just got too busy. Also, the points. Love them as an abstract knitted object, but on my head, they make me think of the Mario Bros. mushroom cap. Not exactly the look I’m going for.

It’s also turned out too big. I blocked it on the needles last night, and I definitely overshot the proper radius of a tam. And so today I rip. Not all the way, but back far enough that I like it again, and then I’m going to start over from there. The good news is that I kind of like the way it feels on my head, so now we just need to work on how it looks.

So, progress. And ripping. They seem to go hand-in-hand, don’t they?

One of my friends from the spinning guild just happens to own a small-scale woolen mill, and yesterday was their fall open house. We went down to take a look, and Branden took a few photos on his phone, as we both managed to forget to bring a camera.

The wool is washed, picked (to open up the locks), and then fed into the machine for carding. Here it is, waiting to drop into the carding drums.

It passes through a long series of drums, getting more and more finely carded along the way.

The center drum is taller than I am, to give you a sense of scale.

At the end of the first carding series, the wool is bundled into roving by gathering it all together and drafting gently.

Then that roving is laid out and fed into a second set of finer cards (this helps it to become a completely uniform thickness).

At the end of the second set of cards, it gets run through a series of little grooves, which turn the batt of fiber…

…into 60 separate threads of extremely fine pencil roving. This gets wound onto a big roll for spinning.

Here’s a close up of that pencil roving coming of the machine.

And here are a few rolls waiting to be spun.

Next, the rolls are put on the spinner. One roll goes on the top of the machine, and all 60 of those ends get threaded down to the holding bobbins (at the very bottom of the picture), which are constantly spinning.

The singles can be wound onto cones,

Or they can be plied using another complicated machine that we didn’t get a picture of.

Then, finally, all of the bobbins are lined up, and wrapped onto a barrel frame to make skeins.

Wool mills like this are apparently pretty rare, so we were lucky to get a chance to see inside. Most of the equipment is more than a hundred years old, and was bought at scrap metal prices when a mill in Massachusetts was closing down. It’s been running here for 22 years now, and they say that it’s still going strong. Every other year, the owners drive out to North Carolina, where another farmer raises the wool that they use to make their yarn (I think it was 500 sheep’s worth). Then, they haul it all down to Texas to go through the one and only scouring plant left in the country. After washing, it’s shipped to Wisconsin, where it goes through these machines and becomes the wool that we buy. Every skein is hand-dyed, in batches of about 10 at a time. It’s a pretty amazing process, and they make some pretty amazing yarn. I’ll show you some of that when we’ve had some sunlight to take pictures.

I’m afraid that the past two weeks haven’t been particularly knitty weeks. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, and a lot of running around, and just haven’t managed to sit still and knit very much. I’m going to New Orleans for a conference on Sunday, so next week will probably also not be very wool-filled. I’m actually debating whether or not it’s worth bringing knitting with me; I almost never end up working on it on this kind of trip, so it might not make it into the suitcase this time. But then, the idea of traveling with no knitting is a bit strange, too. We’ll see what happens when I pack tomorrow.

I did manage to finish Branden’s scarf, and even took a picture last weekend, which I then promptly forgot to post:

It’s done just in time, too. He’s flying back from Austria tomorrow, and then will meet me in New Orleans for a few days of exploring (him, not me, unfortunately), and then he’s home! And, being that he’s been in Atlanta all fall, I’m guessing that coming back to Madison weather is going to be something of a rude awakening. A scarf should be just the thing, and I love how it came out.

I’m also working away on the sweater in the in-between moments here and there. It’s starting to look like something:

(Sorry for the hideous picture, but if I wait until tomorrow to blog, it won’t happen.)

So, there you have it. Two weeks of not much knitting, a whirlwind trip, and then Branden is home. I guess it’s really no wonder that fall seems to be flying by! Hope you have a glorious weekend!

It looks like the blog opinion is about as torn as I am. It’s probably a good thing that I’ve been dragging my feet and playing with the swatch a lot.

Do you see that?

I thought I detected a tiny bit of bias in the knitting, but it disappeared completely when I blocked. But now, after a couple of days of petting, it’s coming back strong. It makes sense that a slipped stitch pattern that only goes one way would have a bias, but it’s rather unfortunate for garment design.

I had 90% decided to go with a slipped stitch cardigan, and I  was sorely tempted to cast on, but I wanted to wait for blog results. And now I’m glad that I did. I’ve knit a sweater with biasing yarn before (that time it was actually the yarn, not the stitch pattern), and there really isn’t a whole lot that you can do to keep it from stretching in odd ways. Especially with an open front.

I thought that maybe I could seam the sides to add some extra stability, but I’m not convinced that will actually help. I thought about trying to add some right-leaning slips to the stitch pattern, but I don’t think that will work based on the way it’s constructed.

So, I think the slipped stitch is out of the running, disqualified for bias. The last thing I want is another sweater knit on size 3 needles that gives me a slightly barberpole look, or worse, that has two front pieces that just won’t match for more than a couple of wears after blocking.

And so, I think the underdog wins. A deep border in trinity, with a body that’s stockinette. I do love the way the trinity feels. I’ll have to be careful not to spend too much time petting my cuffs, so they don’t wear out too fast!

Thank you all for your opinions! It’s nice to know that it will probably work out well either way, since the votes were so evenly split.

Guess it’s time to cast on, huh?