I’ve just realised it’s an awfully long time since I posted an entry here, and for that I apologise. I choose, to a certain extent, to claim that my blogging mojo has taken an early seasonal holiday, and to a certain extent that’s true. I feel as though I somewhat peaked on the early train hat pieces, and I don’t want to let the side down by doing less than good posts on what have turned out to be really quite good hats.

So watch this space, and blow a little wind to get the muse back in this direction please!

In the meantime, although my blogging mojo is AWOL, my knitting mojo certainly isn’t – the stuff’s flying off the needles.

In between making train hats I learned that a friend of mine (Adam) was leaving work. Clearly, he’s more work colleague than friend, but within the work context, one of the folk who make my day a little brighter. And I try to do the same for him. And no, it’s not like that. We’re both clearly not each other’s type. At least, I’m pretty sure we both think that way.

ANYWAY given that I was in the throes of making hats for complete strangers, I thought I could probably afford to do one for someone I like. I had hand-dyed navy yarn made with actual sheep in the stash, which would make for a lovely warm hat. It was originally purchased at i-Knit (the event) in London and wound on ma-bezzie’s yarn winder. Some of it has been used to make a beret for Lily and there was just enough, I thought, to tackle “Chevron” (ravelry link) by WoollyWormhead – one of my fave Hat designers (I used a capital there because she always does).

Initially I made it far too small – I was off gauge so tried to compensate, but I didn’t allow for the pulling-in effect of cables. So I unravelled it and started again.

As an aside, I had a friend staying that weekend who said that as her husband has a small head, it would fit him perfectly. Intending to develop a Plan B for my mate, I offered her the hat.

“Oh no,” she said, “He’d never wear it: it’s not black and the presence of cables makes it a Girls Hat.”

I’d already given that friend a pair of fingerless mitts that weekend, so I wasn’t going to push the point too hard. But I might try to fit a manly entirely black hat into my knitting schedule next year, just to prove it can be done. They live in Amsterdam, a hat can’t be *that* unwelcome.

So, chevron got knitted again, and this time it was an acceptable size.

I’d noticed that while I was knitting this hat, I was getting blue hands from the non-fast dye. So as a service to Adam and whoever does the laundry in his house, I gave it a good soak & block and judging from the colour of the water it’s a good thing I did too.

OF COURSE, before handing it over, I forgot to take any pictures of it. Suffice it to say, it was a thing of beauty. Adam was very pleased to receive it – I gave it to him the day before he left so that he didn’t leave it somewhere in central Manchester during his debauched leaving do.

However, I think blog posts with no pictures are very dull, so instead of a picture of the (even though I say so myself) fab Chevron, here is a picture of Lily with a towel over her head.