Mea culpa

So in my last entry, I airily wrote of my confidence that the grey yarn I found on the workroom table in the basement was the same as the Cascade 220 #9473 I was using for my dad's Morgan hat; and that therefore, it was no problem if I ran out of the single skein I had bought for the project.

Famous.
Last.
Words.

Because on going back to that grey yarn soon after ripping out the hat and starting all over again, it was extremely obvious that it was not the same colour grey. I then compared the mystery grey yarn to the cabled hat of my husband's that I thought it was the leftover for, and hey guess what - not the same colour either, which meant that it was not, in fact, Cascade 220 at all, but something else. (A squeeze-and-smell test revealed that it was actually most likely acrylic, very likely the leftovers from DD1's Gryffindor sweater vest project.)

So, curses!

Especially when I did actually run out of yarn on the Morgan hat.

Fortunately, this didn't happen until I had done everything except the ribbing at the bottom which folds up into the inside of the hat, and is therefore not actually seen from the outside. So I grabbed some red Cascade 220 left over from a sweater project for me and a cowl project for DD1's teacher last year (and by "grabbed", I actually mean "frantically ransacked the house when I couldn't find it in any of the usual spots I expected it be located in"), and used it to do the ribbing. That part finished, it turns out that I even had enough of a grey tail to do all the sewing-up. Thus:

Side view:




One-quarter view (or three-quarters view, I'm not exactly sure how that terminology works):




Front view (very Flemish, I know; I'm sure it would look much less so if the hat were not far too big for the mannequin head):




Detail shot of the red ribbing hem:

Still a little lumpy, but experience with this pattern tells me it will improve substantially after a good steam-blocking.

So I guess this means I've now finished eight of my thirteen holiday knitting projects, right?

Hell, no.

Because I suddenly realised that I had no present for BIL1, whose 50th birthday we celebrated this weekend. I'm not sure how I managed to miss this; it wasn't as though I forgot he had a birthday coming up - we planned a party and have been talking about it for ages, it's been very top-of-mind. I guess my brain just never made the connection that this should have meant doing some knitting.

Well, desperate times call for desperate measures, so I took his Christmas socks and wrapped them up for his birthday. He loved them, and referred to them as something like "the best socks ever" throughout the evening. :) I'm not sure whether I'll make another pair of socks for him for Christmas, or a pair of mittens. That'll be a decision for another day.

And finally, despite the fact that I have already submitted nine design proposals this year and have three more planned (and in fact very close to being all ready to go once the issues I want for them open up for submissions), for a total of twelve for my 12-in-12 challenge...well...I read a few more submission calls and...well...you can probably guess what happened. :) The swatch and the proposal are all ready to go for one submission, I'm planning to send it off tomorrow; and I need to buy some yarn for the second idea. It's kind of crazy to think that there's a very good chance I might be able to do fourteen submissions this year! But we'll see how it goes.

Tomorrow, though, I've just got to get back to making a dent in the holiday knitting. The mittens for our daycare provider and the socks for BIL2 are top of my list. Yes. Really. Dammit.