The three hour hat.

Quilt pictures have been transformed by the magic of resaving in a different file format, but blogger is being a demon from the blackest reaches of foulest hell, and so there will be no photos today. If you just can't wait email me and I will send them along.

Negotiations are ongoing in the getting of the studio. I was trying to rent two rooms, one for my studio and one for my quilting machine, which is mounted to a 12 foot long table and needs at least 2 feet of clearance on all sides in order to operate it. Unfortunately the room that was going to be the quilting workshop has been rented to someone else, and if I try to put it into the room that I was envisioning as the studio then I wouldn’t be able to fit anything else in it…what to do, what to do? I was going to decide last night but circumstances conspired to send me home in a foul mood (nothing that needs talking about here) and I glued myself to my comfy chair and knit a three hour hat instead.

There is much to be said about the three hour hat, but the telling would be sweeter if I had a photo of it…yes Ragnar, wouldn’t it always? It’s fresh in my mind though, so I’m going to tell about it now, and show it later, when blogger is not being a...yeah what I said before.

The tale of the three hour hat.

“My” spinning wheel is actually a semi-permanent lone from some friends who used to run a collective art studio. It’s a Louet S10, and it was abandoned there years ago, and had been suffering in the corner getting progressively dustier. I offered to take it home and love it until such a time as the rightful owner, or the owner of the studio where it had been abandoned should have need of it. I brought it home and dusted it off, oiled some parts, tightened some screws etc. The bobbin was packed full of some of the nastiest handspun I’d ever seen in my life, thick thin, over spun, everything that my first hand spun was but more of it, and covered in a thick layer of gritty dust. I was going to throw it away, but on a whim I decided to ply it and see what came of it, this was obviously someone’s first effort and since the bobbin was packed full they had evidentially stuck with it. How could I just callously toss that into the trash bin, even if that’s where it belonged? What I ended up with was a short skein of bulky, itchy wool, with lots of little sticks in it…not hay, sticks…I think this came from some forest dwelling sheep that liked to roll around a lot, and it left my hands feeling both gritty and greasy…nasty stuff in other words.

Then it lay around the house for a while, because I still couldn’t bring myself to actually throw it into the garbage can. And then last week I went on a yarn washing binge and washed up all of the handspun that I had lying around, including the horrible skein of itchy, stick ridden, greasy/dusty stuff that came with my spinning wheel. I threw it in with some hand dyed (not by me) that bled and so it turned slightly mottled.

In my foul mood of last night I was indulging in some fiber therapy by taking the dried yarn off of the laundry rack in my bathtub and admiring how beautiful it was etc. when mine eine beheld the skanky yarn. It had been improved somewhat by washing, fluffier, and not as greasy but it still had it’s slubby, overspun stick-encrusted characteristics…in short it was the perfect yarn for my foul mood. I rummaged through my needles, settling on 11’s as a nice prime number and then glued by bottom to my comfy chair and did not move it for 3 hours. I knit with all the vigor you might expect from someone in a foul mood who is knitting with awful yarn and getting jabbed by little bits of sticks. In fact I’m surprised I didn’t give myself a hand cramp. About half way up the hat I was disappointed to realize that it wasn’t turning out as crappily as I had intended, so I put some bobbles on it. When I reached the end I still had a sizeable ball of yarn left so I added a large pompom. When I set it down in front of me and glared at it with my evil eye…I realized that I wasn’t in a bad mood anymore. A miracle.

Now I just have to find someone who deserves a lot of bad mojo to give it to.

Ragnar…knitting is my voodoo.