Men without hats

Warning: if you are on my Christmas gift-giving list, what the heck are you doing reading my blog this close to Santa Day? For heaven's sake, get off now before your surprise is ruined.

Ahem. Where was I? Oh, yes.

Turns out that both my BILs are getting hats for Christmas this year. As I've mentioned before, the oldest one is getting my KWB/TSF Hat in blue and grey, but that I was having yarn supply challenges with the blue. Well, Deb pointed out the obvious - that since I was not having yarn supply issues with the grey (rather the opposite), I should make the earflaps all grey. Big thanks to her, because that's exactly what I did. The earflaps are now grey on both sides instead of grey on one side and blue on the other:

As you can see, the earflaps do still use blue on the edges, which meant I had a float of blue going between the two layers of the earflap on each row. But this was not a problem, I just made sure to give the blue strand a tiny tug after every two grey stitches - not enough to pucker the work, but just enough to make sure that there was no blue bulging out between the grey stitches. As you can see, it worked very well and I was able to get through both earflaps with the blue.

Unfortunately, I still have to do one last row of blue at the front of the hat and I don't have enough left to do it. But I'm not worried about that - I can use this yarn that I found in my stash and with just one row of it I'm sure the subtle colour difference between it and the original won't be noticeable:

That's what I'm hoping, anyway! What I might actually do is undo the cast-off on the back so that the real blue from the project can be used for the front (where people will be looking at it more), and then I'd use the substitute blue on the back.

Thanks also go out to Danielle for suggesting mismatched earflaps. She is quite right that the recipient has character enough to pull that off. Sadly, I am too anal to be able to do that without whining about it until the end of time. :)

But I did mention that both BILs were getting hats this Christmas, didn't I? And this is where we get to the part where I gloat, because the second hat is actually all done. Yes, I completed a Christmas gift before the middle of October. And he is going to love it:

It's a Jayne hat. He is a big Firefly fan and I fully expect that he will flip over it. Here it is modelled on my rather surly-looking older daughter (it's too big on her, obviously):

It was a stashbuster too - the leftover orange and red from the last gift I ever knitted for my MIL (i.e. BIL's mother) turned out to be the PERFECT colours to make this hat as accurate as possible, and I used them all up. I did have to bring in some other yarns for the pom-pom, but I still think it looks great.