new hair, new hat

I got tired of having to bleach my hair blonde every six weeks, and my poor hair was also ready to back to dark I was a bit scared of what might happen, so the woman who cut my hair a few weeks ago recommended an intermediary color before going back to brown. I chose chocolate cherry.

I have been doing this a long time and have been pretty lucky as far as mishaps go. Sigh. Until yesterday. It wasn't a complete disaster, but there is a band of yellow (only noticeable in some light) on the back of my head where the darker color didn't saturate entirely.

 Well, it *is* an intermediary color. And Dan likes it, so how can I complain? At any rate, this gave me the impetus to knit like a woman possessed and get my first Escargot done. Yes, you heard me, my first. I fell in love with this pattern as soon as it came out last week and have been thinking about little else until I could get to knit this hat. So here it is.

I'm not one of those people who normally knits the new "it" thing as soon as it comes out. In fact, I seldom pay attention to those things. But someone on Twitter mentioned the new Knitty was out, so I looked, and WOW I must have that hat. Soon.

So please don't tell my mum but I opened the Christmas present from her early. I had to, see, because I am in limbo right now and I thought that her gift might be a useful thing and I sure didn't want to have to lug around a box of something. It turned out to be yarn. My mum is so sweet, buying me yarn. It's Sirdar Family Worsted With Wool, with a 75% acrylic content, which I wasn't very excited about (I hate knitting with acrylic), but it has actually been a pretty good yarn to knit with. She gave me two balls of green and two of ivory, about 800 yards in total. I can probably get four hats out of that. My next Escargot will be ivory with green trim.


I had issues with this right off the bat because it wants you to cast on 240 stitches. Whoa whoa whoa, right away, once there are more than say, 60 stitches, I run into problems if I don't use a stitch marker. (Remember the Mezquita?) I had way too many, so took a bunch off, then I think there was a problem with the second row and me not reading the pattern right (that's what I get for watching movies with subtitles while knitting), so I frogged and restarted. And then I just couldn't put the thing down.

It was at about 11pm last night where, less than an inch away from starting the crown decrease, that I actually had to admit I was tired and needed to go to bed. So I did. But you can bet the first thing I did when I got up this morning (after I made coffee of course) was pick it up. I had it finished and ends woven in by 2pm today, with a few interruptions (or else it would have been done sooner).

I haven't blocked it yet, and I have several items that need to be blocked so I think I will get to that in the next few days. But I'm pretty excited about this hat and think that you should totally knit one too.