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The gretel hat is complete, and I am kinda unsure about it. The pattern is lovely, the yarn is scrumptious, but it may look funny on my head.

Yes, I know I have a funny look on my face. I feel totally uncomfortable in this hat (and truth be told, I hate my teeth and never like to show them in pictures). This may be one of those knits that totally appeals to me asthetically, but looks like crap on me. I am undecided. Perhaps if I wear it in public as a “trial run”. I can count how many weird stares I get, add it to the amount of people who start laughing the moment they see me, and subtract the number of those that look politely away and whisper behind my back.

Okay, it’s not all as bad as that. But I do feel uncomfortable in it!

I have been getting a bit of other stuff done as well. I finished spinning up Adrian’s December club offering, Frosted Forest. It’s a 50/50 Merino and Soy Silk blend. The colours on this were beautiful and perfect. There was no way I was going to like the yarn as much as the roving, so maybe I should have just not spun it and kept it as a weird animal-hair-intestine-coloured decoration. Instead, I have what will be interesting yarn to knit up.

I have 440 yards (I KNOW! That’s so much, and it wasn’t even four oz.) of a two ply light fingering:

And I had some left on one of the bobbins, so I made 82 yards of a navajo three-ply. This may be the most annoying fibre in the world to navajo ply. It must have broke about ten times. I wanted to murder things. However, me, my wheel, and the yarn made it through relatively unscathed. I think navajo plying may be something you need to advance plan for. A bit of extra twist would have helped the singles be a bit more resistant to breakage and would have helped me maintain my sanity much better.

Now I would have thought that keeping the colours consistent would have made a big visual difference in these hanks. It didn’t. It should make a larger difference during the knitting of the yarn, but I don’t know that I care whether these colour runs stay together. I thought I would, but maybe they are great either way. In fact, I may even prefer the two ply. My original plan was to spin the two ply hoping to match the colours, but I was WAY WAY WAY off. It’s okay, in the end this was a great experiement and I learned a lot about the fibre and all sorts of other things (like how to string ten swear words together while still counting your treadles).

Adrian, if you will ever have more of this I would love to get some. Just so I can save it for the day when I am an Awesome Spinner and I will be able to create the beautiful yarn that this roving deserves. Not that I don’t love the yarn I made, just that this roving was so special and unique, and the yarn is very pretty but not as awe inspiring as the roving was. Do I sound like a total weirdo right now with my roving love? Seriously, it was gorgeous stuff. Remember?

Alright, enought abouy my roving fetishes (butgodiloveitsomuch) and on to more knitting. Here is where the Road to Golden Teal and Grey v2 stands at this moment.

Only two more repeats and it’s done. Pretty exciting! And to end on a low note, why can’t Knitpicks make needle cords that don’t do this:

Bastards. That is 5 cords out of my Option set that have broken. Yes, five out of… six? Is it six cords in the set? What a ridiculous proportion. Most of them are now glued back together, but for those that can’t be I am going to ask for some replacements.