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I have finally recovered from realizing that the hours of knitting that led to the creation of button bands and the shawl collar for my Arlo sweater were a fail. Arlo spent a couple of weeks in timeout. I knit a couple of hats and worked on a few long term projects.

Over the weekend, I ripped it all out. The uneven looking button holes, the too-small shawl collar, the wonky picked up stitch in one corner – it’s all gone.

Somehow, everything worked better this time. The stitches picked up evenly and I’m through the first group of short rows. A little bit of tender discipline and love and suddenly, Arlo is back to being my darling.

There’s a certain type of blue. A sort of luminous, turquoisey color that makes you feel like you’ve fallen into a deep, calm Caribbean lagoon. I’ve invested a lot of time into learning to dye yarn just that color and I like the result. But, no matter how many different types of light I try to photograph it in, I can’t capture the color accurately.

This is my hat, after completing clue two, for the 2015 Woolly Wormhead Mystery KAL. I love the pattern and it’s a fun knit. The yarn is Elliebelly Bleu, an aran weight Blue Faced Leicester yarn. And the color, which is not, to my great frustration, accurately depicted in any of the photos below, is Margery.

The middle photo is closest, but it doesn’t really capture it. It lacks the depth, the richness and the shimmer of the yarn. Is there a photography class in my future? Or is there some trick with lighting I’m simply not aware of? I’m going to carry the hat around with me and snap pictures in different places in hopes I can come up with something accurate. But I won’t be quitting my day job to become a photographer anytime soon!

I've just started working on Clue Two for the Woolly Wormhead Hat Mystery Knit Along 2015.  Note to self: deep blue yarn requires really good lighting, particularly if you're going to do cables late at night.  Slow progress.  Not enough time.

Don't you love the yarn, though?  And the smooth, even garter stitch brim.  It's so simple, but so beautiful.  I'm hoping to make a little progress tonight.  The husband is binge watching Supernatural, and I'm going to join him, surrounding myself with all the Ott lamps I can find, and see if I can make a little progress this evening.

Ever since the Plucky Knitter came out with her Marled Hat pattern — essentially just two strands of different yarns held together for a simple hat — it seems like everyone has been knitting them. My version, knit over a couple of days in New Orleans this week, is making me quite happy.

Ellie has stolen it.  I'm hoping that's only temporary, but it did give me the opportunity to snap a couple of quick photos.

Despite its simplicity, the marled colors make it charming,  And, because its finished without decreasing stitches (I actually decreased nine stitches in each of the two final rounds because of the bulk when I tried to finish the hat with the full number still in place) it has a lovely, dimpled crown.

The marled fabric is wonderful and the possibilities are endless.  Although these two colors are very close, I'm swatching for a sweater with a higher contrast marled fabric, and I like that as well.  Best of all, the pattern is free, making this a wonderful quick knit for some pretty skeins in your stash.

The girl you see knitting while waiting for a plane? That would be me this week, in three different airports in four days.

A Marled Hat in progress (The Plucky Knitter Scholar marled with Bello Worsted) and my ongoing monster Drachenfels, which seems to go on forever.

Sent from my iPhone

And just like that, it's finished.

My notes say that I started this project on October 6, 2008, which was a lifetime ago.  I had no idea that six months later, I would luck into the job of a lifetime; demanding, wonderful, fun, consuming, and definitely not conducive to turning out an afghan, knit from sock yarn (seriously, sock yarn? what the hell was I thinking?), in a few months. I had several slow knitting years in there where I was lucky to knit a just a cowl or a scarf.  But, my goal all along had been to knit this for my daughter and give it to her before she went off to college, so I knew I had time. I decided to get serious about it late last year, and recommitted myself to knitting squares. The squares were great airplane knitting. I knit them in Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Jerusalem.  I knit them during football games.  Roll Tide!

The squares are really the story of my adult knitting life.  The early ones are a little wonky.  I missed a yarn over or did something funky with a stitch in some of those early squares, and didn't notice, so you can see the mistake in the final quilt.  I ran out of yarn in one, and had to do the last couple of rows with a different yarn.  The most recent ones are more technically proficient, but still have the loving look of handmade.  About half of the squares are knit with yarn that I dyed, and others with remnants from favorite socks or other projects.  There is one preternaturally neon square that sticks out.  Some of the others look more beautiful combined together than they do individually.  It is, after all, a barn-raising quilt, meant to be a collection that comes together with meaning, and I hope it will have just that for my sweet child as she ventures out into the world.

One final note.  I don't crochet.  I really don't.  But, I wanted this quilt to have the beautiful crochet edges I had seen on another project years ago.  My sweet local yarn store owner did that part for me.  She took hours, and hours, and hours to do it.  It is beautiful and perfect.  The picot edges are so incredibly pretty.  What could come together in life without friends?  Certainly nothing in mine!

I swore I never would.  I like to pick out my own patterns.  But somehow, I got sucked into the allure of a mystery KAL: Woolly Wormhead 2015.  It started on November 1.

So, I dyed yarn.  It's Elliebelly BFL in the Margery colorway, one of those delicious, deep turquoises that is difficult for me to get a good photo. (Note to self: new year's resolutions 2016, learn to use a camera.)  This was the closest I could get. The hat is knit in three "clues", and the design is a mystery until you finish it.  I'm hoping it will be something I will wear a lot — I dyed two extra skeins for a cowl to go along with it because I fell in love with the Aran-Style Cowl, after seeing it knit up as a Plucktober project.  If the hat is something that will even vaguely work with this cowl, I'm going to be knitting it in my dreamy blue yarn.

© NIHON VOGUE-SHA Co., Ltd

Since it's a mystery KAL, no real in-progress pictures until the end of the month.  Without revealing too much (actually, without revealing anything except what my car's steering wheel looks like), here is my photo after finishing the first clue.