This is how you thank a knitter

As you may recall, last year, my younger BIL called my attention to the concept of "The Jayne Hat". He is a massive fan of Firefly and wanted to let me know that, as much as he adored the AFK Hat I made for him for Christmas '08, he would never, ever be disappointed if it happened to satisfy my knitting muse to make him a Jayne hat.

Now, in actual fact, I was already quite aware of the Jayne Hat phenomenon and would have considered it as a gift for him before his hint if I hadn't already made him a hat. However, if he wouldn't mind two hats, far be it from me to pass up a good knitted gift idea when it is presented to me; and I went ahead and made it. You may remember it:

He lives far away and we thought he would be able to visit for the holidays, but it ended up not happening. And what with one thing and another (none of which were my fault, I feel I should mention), it wasn't until the beginning of February that said BIL received our package containing his Christmas gifts. I found out pretty quickly that they had arrived and been well received, because I suddenly had an email from him in my inbox with the subject heading of

JAYNE!!!

To which email was attached this shot:

(I don't feel the least bit weird about posting it here because he has since begun using it as his avatar all over his social media accounts. :)

The content of the email message was simple and eloquent:

Thanks soooo much! I loves it!

All of the gifts are wonderful. Mucho appreciado. Ya nailed it.

And then, in response to my "so glad you liked it" reply:

I cannot say how cool this is. It's by far the best gift I've received in years. As I said: ya nailed it.

[compliments about the other gifts that were in the care package]

All in all, stellar.

And then, not satisfied with expressing his delight in mere text, he called to thank me. He said that the hat could not possibly have been a better gift.

Heh.

So I told him how the orange and the red yarn used in his hat were left over from the very last gift I ever knitted for his mom before she died.

....Aaaaand suddenly I went from awesome to epic. :) Eventually we moved from phone to Skype for our chat (he wore the hat for the video call, of course).

Then he Tweeted about the hat, and managed to get it re-Tweeted by a Canadian journalist with a whole mess of followers so I could get a bit of a traffic spike to the blog.

Needless to say, I feel like my skills are tremendously appreciated.

But to be honest, he had me at "JAYNE!!!". :)