One Red Hat done!

I got a good chance to knit the cabled red hat Saturday afternoon while La-la napped. I'm still trying to figure out what to call everyone here. Do I go by the Dh, DD, SS, MIL stuff, use their initials and hope the context makes you figure it out, first names? What? Do I do formal introductions? So, anyway. Little girl naps, momma gets to knit up a storm! I got it finished this afternoon. Hooray!

I picked up a pattern at Sip N Knit - Ann Norling Any Gauge/Any Size Hat - formulas and suggestions for making various styles and various sizes of hats. It has guidelines for hat sizing for variously aged people, so with this, swatching for gauge, and free patterns out there on the net, I should be able to scale down other interesting hat ideas to make what I want for anyone. Yippee! So...I went to the Sip N Knit under the pretense of looking for a hat pattern, which I found. But there was a sale bin! 40% off. Unfortunately, I'm accustomed to what I've been thinking of as "drug store yarns" - stuff you can pick up at Wal-Mart, Michael's or JoAnn's. Even the pricey stuff there is well under $10/skein. I hadn't been to a gourmet wool shop and even though I've spent a lot of time browsing gourmet wool online...even with 40% off, I spent about $50 on 8 hanks/skeins of yarn and the pattern. I got two skeins of worsted Brown Sheep Waverly one green (5112), one blue (7111), Sirdar Snuggly in a pale shade of bluish grey Filatura Di Crosa Empire, a wool/silk blend. 3 balls of a very dark purple, one of a lighter purple. Unfortunately, it seems like that I have a bunch of other varieties of yarn in that same pale bluish gray. I've also been known to buy the exact same shade of lipstick and nailpolish as ones that I already own. Gotta keep an eye on that. I'm thinking hats in the Sirdar Snuggly, the wool/silk will be something nice for me. Perhaps instead of the Sari-a-long (or the same pattern, different yarn), and felting experiments for the worsted wool, if I can make them work with the colors I already have on hand.

Gonna move stuff from queue to queue and start working on a shiny purple acrylic hat to go with the 2nd seed scarf and watch the Oscars.