Putting the yay in hiatus!

I....don't really know what that means. I had a nice little break from perpetually sitting in front of a computer for work, so I decided to take a little blogging break as well. So, Merry Belated Christmas. I hope you found everything under the Christmas tree/menorah/Festivus pole that you yearned for. And had some togetherness, family, blah blah blah.

Virtually no one received knitting presents from me this year. I put it off waaaaay too long and last minute knitting is anti-fun. I think I've set a bad precedent in the last couple of years by giving people knit-wear, and now they expect it...sorry.

However, I did gift mommy dearest with this son-of-a-b:



It turned out fine, but I'm glad it's done. I probably spent more time screwing it up than actually knitting it correctly. And she totally hates the color. I can tell. Just give it to Goodwill already, geez (just kidding, Mom. You will hold onto that until the day you die and wear it when I come over even if you despise it. Because it was made with love, dammit).

A lovely friend received a hat (finished) and another lovely friend mittens (pathetically unfinished). I gave her the work in progress, which was basically a cuff, and then immediately took it back. Totally weak....sorry. I gave the former friend (boy that sounds bad, I mean that in the sense of former-latter) an unfinished knit gift last year, so I thought I should spread the love around.

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For many a New Years Eve, the copilot and I have been notoriously boring. Usually in the midst of a ski trip, it becomes clear how arbitrary the midnight celebration is - "Well, we live in the central time zone, but here we are in mountain time, no wait, pacific time...what time is it? Screw it, I'm going to bed."

What to do this year? It was the first time in five years we'd actually been home for NYE. Some co-workers were having a party, but ehhhhh...too much family related travel, and we just weren't feeling festive. But we both kinda wanted to see the new Tron movie...

Now let's get this strait. I have zero nostalgia for the original Tron, save a very random moment from the old Halloween 3-D episode of the Simpsons:

OOOOOOK, so I could only find the clip in Spanish. You get the idea, Homer compares the world he's stumbled into to Tron, and everyone denies they've ever seen the movie except for Chief Wiggum, who quickly backpedals when he realizes he's the only one.

But I was totally sucked in by the marketing. I mean, stuff blows up, and there's light-cycle racing, and Olivia Wilde looking all sexy...but, oh, the mediocre reviews. I was wary. I didn't want to be bored to death on this sacred holiday of the new year. So I took a big step...I let my knitting-freak-flag fly high. The new AC bag got packed with Mystery Wedding Project (which is clearly no longer a mystery but I can't quit calling it that), because who can't do garter stitch in the dark?

I knit on airplanes and trains all the time, but this was definitely the most random public knitting I've ever done. Let me tell you friends, it was awesome. I was entertained by the 'splosions and pretty colors, and when it got all talky-talky I could just knit away. I got a huge grin from a fellow movie-goer when he saw the knitting shenanigans. I highly recommend it! Err, maybe not if you're going to see Black Swan, though. Somebody might lose an eye.

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In other awesome news....I finished it!


The ridiculously poorly composed self-portrait. Silken Scabbard, with Touch Yarns Merino.

The sleeve issue solved: I took yarn from one sleeve, evened them out, then blocked the shit out of it. It seems to have worked. This is the first sweater I've made for myself that I LOVE. Big thanks to Vivianne for offering to try to round up some more yarn for me!

The key to this pattern was try it on, try it on, try it on some more. Armpit positioning was essential to place the neckline where I wanted it. I made the same sweater for my mom, and the neckline doesn't sit as well because she wasn't around for fittings. If you're interested in the details, check out the project page.

Infinite Cabled Hat

It was Mahatma Gandhi who once said, "Sometimes you just have to crap or get off the toilet." (OK, maybe that wasn't Gandhi.) I've had this hat pattern on my hands for too long, and it's time to release it into the wild and see if someone can wring some joy from it. Without further ado,

Infinite Cabled Hat - click for free PDF


"The Infinite Cabled Hat is a fabulous project for those who are familiar with cabling, and want to make something that looks complex without actually straining the brain too much! Two needle sizes are used to account for the tension change between the brim and the body (where the cables are introduced). The cables put a twist on the conventional roll-brim by ruffling the edges, nicely framing your face. A clever decreasing scheme keeps the cables going all the way to the top."

Enjoy!

Pay to play?

Still plugging away on the shawl and MWP...I could really use a finished object right now.

In an effort to have some sort of FO, I finally had my copilot take some glamor shots of my Infinite Cabled Hat design.


Probably not one of the ones I'm going to use.

I need to do a last once over of the pattern corrections and make sure that 2 + 2 indeed = 4, but it's pretty much ready to go. Before I release the pattern, I wanted to get some feedback/thoughts from you knitters. I put a decent amount of effort into the pattern, followed it myself, had the sizes tested, etc. I'm thinking of putting it for sale for something like a buck or two, not because I have any delusions about making money, but because I'm proud of the pattern and I stand behind it. I feel like when patterns are free, you have no right to expect things like accuracy or clarity. Basically, you get what you pay for, and anything above that is great but not expected. I want to send the message that I stand behind the pattern enough to ask for a pittance, and if a person does find an error or have a problem they feel like they can contact me because after all, they did pay for it.

This is where I need some help. Do you tend to pay for patterns or gravitate towards free ones? Does paying for a pattern totally turn you off, or does it make you more likely to do a pattern? Any other thoughts, if you managed to follow my rant?

Another slightly related tangent is, when do you usually start looking at patterns for the upcoming season? This one happens to be appropriate for fall. Is it to early to be thinking of the fall chill? I'm totally a live in the moment knitter...if it's cold I want to be knitting cold weather items, and vice versa for the summer. I have no knitting foresight. Do you? In essence, is there any point to putting it for sale now?

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I learned something very interesting about the chew sticks that I've been buying for Sammy (the beast) recently. Back up to when we first adopted him, he was eating everything he could snatch up off of the ground. Rocks, paper, and he especially loved eating sticks. We weren't sure if this behavior was just because he was young or because he'd spent an unknown amount of time scavenging as a stray on the mean streets of Milwaukee (probably both). I went to the local pet supplies shop in search of something more constructive for him to chew on. They had a half-wall filled with different varieties of rawhide-eque items, so I selected some that looked most like regular sticks, called bully sticks.

He LOVED chewing on these, and it took him a nice long while to work through them. Since then I've bought him a few different varieties of rawhide, but he never cares for them as much as the bully sticks. A few unfortunate times, we bought a stick or two that just smelled rank. "Sammy, why do you smell like farm animal??". After that, I took to rummaging through the bin and sniffing the sticks in order to avoid the stinky ones. Last night, curiosity got the best of me and I decided to find out exactly what bully sticks are made of.

Bull penis. I crap you not. I read through this with my mouth sort of hanging halfway open. It all became clear why these are more expensive than regular rawhide...kind of a delicacy, eh? The clerks at the pet supply store probably know me by sight now. "Here comes that wang-sniffing chick again..."

My testers = rock stars

I've said it before, but I'll say it again--I love interacting with the Ravelry Test Group, both as a designer and a tester. Two of my testers are finished, and when they posted photos, I may have squealed and clapped my hands like a seal.

From the needles of MsKniterrific:


And on the other side of the globe, celia:


This was the 'problem child'. Not the tester, the size medium design. It was acting out in class, not eating it's vegetables, and disrespecting my authorit-ay (metaphorically speaking).

These gals rock my world. I still have one holdout, and she's been methodical in finding errors, which is excellent. They were all good sports about corrections and dealing with my crazy.

If seeing the finished product was validating, the process of working through concerns and errors was extremely informative (newsflash: not everyone thinks exactly like me or can read my mind). I know, right?

Lastly, courtesy of Dyeing to Knit, my latest entertainment fixation: Regretsy (warning: some of it is not entirely safe for work/little ones, but you can claim the ol' "but it's art" excuse if your boss looks over your shoulder). I've totally made things on the level of some of this stuff before, but at least I've never tried to sell it to anyone.

Testing, testing

I want to take a quick break from the rigorous topics of blog week to update on the status of the Infinite Cabled Hat. Encouraged by Natalie J, last Sunday I pulled the trigger on submitting a request to the Free Pattern Testers group in Ravelry. First of all, let me say that my experience has been overwhelmingly positive. I requested three testers, one each for sizes S, M, and L. I immediately got one tester, then service was a little slow but the next two came in a day or so. Oddly enough, two additional people volunteered after I posted this picture in the thread to show how the brim looked when someone was wearing it:


I know, right? For some reason me imitating the Fonz is a selling point. But it has been amazing to get so much feedback, and so quickly. The first tester who started was terrified when she first cast-on and her work looked like it was going to be a gigantor hat (the cables pull everything in a lot). She actually took what she had started apart thinking that it must be a typo. She recommended that I add a line to assure the pattern user that this was in fact expected and correct, something that I never would have thought of. I know how it's supposed to look, so why doesn't everyone else (because everyone is a mind reader, right)? So what I'm saying is that I love my testers and I want to marry them. Well, maybe that would be rushing things. Civil union?

But. It wasn't all chocolate and roses. I wasn't sure that I was going to even discuss this, because it was actually fairly upsetting to me. Since the rest of my experience has been so much fun, though, I think we're OK. After I'd confirmed my first tester, I got this message. I'm going to quote verbatim, so there's no chance of hyperbole:

"It’s really adorable. I’m wondering if there may be some copyright issues with Cully’s Cabled Hat. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional when you designed it, its just terribly similar."

My jaw dropped. I was ready for my testers to rebel, saying that my pattern sucked ass and was completely wrong, or not to get any testers at all, but this wasn't even on my radar. This penetrated deep into my stone cold heart. The post was edited about a half and hour later to add:

"Then again, culley’s is two color, and what do I know about copyrights. Just something for you to consider when you publish.
Good luck with the test!"

I'm assuming the addition was brought on when the poster realized how incredibly bitchy his/her first post sounded, so I do appreciate that. But the whole thing really threw me for a loop.

Now if you check out Cully's Cabled Hat, you'll see that it's actually the same concept as what I was referring to as the South Face Hat: the two color stranding that I didn't think turned out very well as a swatch. Even barring the difference of being one color, my design has a different brim and a much different decreasing scheme (which I prefer, naturally). Now this was from Vogue Knitting (the Winter '09/'10 edition), the supposedly high fashion knitting mag; apparently we are both so cutting edge that we knocked off a hat that I've been seeing on the ski slopes for at least two years now. Needless to say, I've decided not to pursue constructing the South Face Hat, unless I completely redesign. I think to actually get the effect that I'm going for, we're going to have to go entrelac (which definitely has already been done).

What I've taken away from this is that I need to be confident in my creations and stand behind them! Grrrrrrr! (That's my scary-stand-behind-my-creations growl).

Also! New stash came in. Behold:


First peek.

The skein at the bottom has the football, I think.

That's what we call a 'made my day' right there.

Extrapolating a hat to different sizes

In writing up the pattern for the Cozy Cabled Hat, one of the things I got the biggest kick out of was figuring out how to fit different sizes. Finally, something fun to do with math! I'm actually exaggerating, I'm one of those freaks who likes to do math (please don't throw your rotten fruit at me--I'll help you balance your checkbook if you'll put down that torch). For hats, it's relatively straightforward: if your gauge is X in units of stitches/inch and your head circumference is Y in inches, multiply X times Y and you know how many stitches you need to make it around your noggin. In formula form:


Full disclosure: I made the formula picture in Gimp, thinking it would be a great time to work on my graphic design skillz. I thought maybe I could make it pretty and colorful and loveable, and after working on it for 30 min this was as far as I'd gotten. Graphic designers, I bow to you. To atone for this crappy, boring picture, here are some puppies!

Aww.

Aww!

AWW!

There, now don't we all feel better? The same principle of the formula also applies to rows. It was easy-peasy on the Cozy Cabled Hat; the extra stitches I added for the larger sizes meant extra rows when it came to decreasing at the top. I also designed it with a fold-up brim--which added a LOT of leeway--so I didn't worry about length too much (i.e. at all). On the Infinite Cabled Hat, I used a specific decreasing scheme to get the cables to appear to continue, even though half of them were gone. I needed to make sure that it would translate to the larger sizes.

But first, how many inches of length does one need in relation to the circumference of their head? Assumption #1: The human head is a sphere (a ball, basically). Assumption #2: A hat should cover approximately half of the sphere. This leads to the conclusion that length from the top to bottom of the hat should be approximately half that of the circumference of the hat. I was hoping that I could get pi involved (mmm pi) but it wasn't even that complex.

Now, for the task at hand: for every one inch increase in circumference, a 1/2 inch increase in length was required. The problem: my row gauge was 8 stitches/inch, and the pattern repeats every 8 rows. See what I'm driving at here? The small and large sizes work out perfectly, but the medium size ends up cabling smack in the middle of the decreasing, which we just couldn't have. I pondered and pondered. I started to think of it as AC and the Angry Half-Inch. And then it came to me, as almost all of my knitting solutions do, right before I was about to fall asleep (seriously!)--stick that extra junk on the bottom half of the sucker instead of the top. And they say today's youth don't have any critical thinking skills.

I'm going to try to get the various sizes tested through a Ravelry group of free pattern testers. I've tried to be a tester for others a couple of times, but nothing has gone all the way to fruition. It seems like a neat system though. I feel a bit silly asking for people to try out my little endeavor, but nothing ventured, nothing gained (it also doesn't hurt that internet tends to be anonymous, so no one can laugh directly at my shame).

CA to WI

The arduous journey from Berkeley (the Madison of the west coast) to Madison (the Berkeley of the midwest) is finally complete. I'm sorry for the blog hiatus, part of it was forced--there's no internet on the "Loneliest Road in America" in Nevada. It looks mostly like this:

BFE, NV

Other than the giant sand dune cleverly named "Sand Mountain":

Pile of Sand, NV

Southern Utah had crazy rock formations, sand, scrub brush, and more crazy rock formations:

Some Rocks, UT

A Gorge, UT

Colorado was snowy when we entered the mountains. It still remains my favorite state to drive through (until you reach the flat part outside of Denver, of course). I must have been so entranced that I forgot to take any photos. Sorry.

Then we entered Nebraska. Enough said.




When we started to get into Iowa, I started to feel like I was back home agaaaaaaain in Indiaaaaana:

Farmland, IA

Lots of farmland, but nice rolling hills to drive on.

A short jaunt through Wisco, and I was home. Then we unloaded the car, and unpacked everything right away. Ahahahaha, sorry, I couldn't even type that with a straight face. The apartment is a wreck, naturally.

I'm proud to say that some knitting was completed over the course of the trip, in fact, an entire deconstruction/reconstruction of the Infinite Cabled Hat:

Who's got two thumbs, speaks limited French, and has a kick-ass hat? This moi.

I'm actually going to give it to my friend in Oakland, who fed me many times while I was on my CA project. Here it is in all it's glory:

Love. It. Want one for myself.

But in conclusion, I'm just glad to be able to stop punishing my body with diner/fast food, and get back to punishing it with cheese and beer.

Move out blues

When you're in college, or just your first few years away from the home where you grew up, it seems that you move around relatively often. Leases end, new jobs begin, perhaps romance blossoms, and you end up like a pinball being bounced around by...by some kind of...pinball wizard, or something (hey, someone should make a song about that!). My copilot and I have continued this nomadic lifestyle a bit beyond your average time span. Since I don't plan on ever growing up, this isn't terribly surprising, but I despise the move out process. I'm not even just talking about packing and the move itself (which also totally suck, don't get me wrong), I hate the general funk that hovers (perhaps figuratively and literally) over the homestead in the weeks leading up to the move.

I've been renting a room from a very nice, laid back couple during my stay here at Berkeley. We'll call them M and D (no, I'm not living at home with my Mom and Dad). M has a propensity for doing her dishes immediately after using them, D doesn't really see the point in that. They've struck on a compromise where D has a tub that he puts his dishes in when he doesn't feel like cleaning them, and can come back and do them later. For the first couple of months, I was also diligent about cleaning my dishes right after I was finished with them. As time went by, I steadily lost motivation for dish doing, and M subtly put out another tub. I've come to think of it as the Tub of Shame. After that, I did my best to keep the ToS empty, but the move-out funk has rolled in. I noticed while eating breakfast this morning that a small pyramid had formed. So much dish related shame. I've completely lost motivation for bettering my living conditions. Here's a small taste, just the desk:

Oh hey, there's that sock I still haven't finished in the lower right corner there. Mmm I see some Joe-Joe's too (Trader Joe's equivalent to Oreos, which I may or may not have been eating in bed last night).

If a well-bred Victorian lady came into my room, she would put her handkerchief to her forehead and faint, mortified at the mess (a well-bred Victorian man would drop his monocle into his drink, of course). I started knitting what I've come to think of as the Infinite Cabled Hat last night in an effort to snap out of it:

I *heart* cables.

It's a hat(sort of. It's hat-ish)!

I think it helped a bit. I love me some Cascade 220 yarn, especially the Heathers line. So reasonably priced! Such pretty colors! My LYS back home has a whole wall dedicated to the 220. I heard that they recently changed owners, and the 220 wall better not be on the chopping block (I'm looking at you, Lakeside Fibers--do not make me drive into Fitchburg for my fix!)!

Infinite test swatch deux

So, I made a two color infinite test swatch. And...well, see for yourself:


Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I almost didn't want to tell you about it. First, the colors are horrible, I know. I know. I was trying to use up some scraps. I'm trying not to let that "color" my opinion (see what I did there?). But the cables still aren't doing what I want them to. Let's go in for a closer look:


I don't want it to look like cabling, I want it to look like a woven basket. Here's the rub-I don't know if the cables are strained because 4 stitches are kind of a lot to exchange and expect the tension not to show, or if it's just my lousy two-color work. Since I was just making a small swatch, I had to use double pointed needles. Kids, don't try this at home. I did a horrible job maintaining the tension of my floats. If this was a Project Runway challenge, Tim Gunn would have come over to my station, put on his concerned face, and note that "There's a LOT going on here." Well I'm sorry Tim, when you've got five needles and two strands of yarn in play, it's hard to keep track of what the hell is going on. I think I need to make a bigger swatch, one were I can use circular needles and not pull the floats ridiculously tight half of the time. Or maybe I need a different strategy. Or both. Argh, this flies in the face of my swatch making sensibilities (i.e. I hate making them). And why is Luke Wilson all bloated and pushing AT&T? Why am I out of Diet Coke?? WHY MUST EVERYTHING BE SUCH A STRUGGLE??!

It's not all bad though, now that I think of it. On our way back to the office after lunch, we had to walk through the 'protest quad' - people schlepping everything from petitions to save endangered sea slime to seeking new members for their religion, the Church of Oprah Winfrey. But today, there was a girl with no agenda to push but chocolate cupcakes for 50 cents. I was in the "we don't want any" zone and almost passed it up. Best 50 cents I've spent in quite a while. I was a little worried that being Berkeley, they might be "special" cupcakes, but I figure, hey, it's just more bang for my half-buck.

Infinite test swatch

I started knitting a test swatch for what I've been thinking of as my "South Face" hat. I thought the concept was relatively easy: instead of cabling back and forth, the stitches would keep getting passed the same way (moving always right or always left) and passed over and under each other making a basket-weave. I decided to make a swatch in one color first. It became clear (shamefully, it should have been clear before I started) that if you are constantly moving stitches one direction, they're going to hit the edge eventually and have nowhere to go. I had to make an 'infinite test swatch'--a tube, so the cables could keep moving around. Here's what formed:


I'm sure this is not a new stitch--I'm excellent at reinventing the wheel. This wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but I think it's still cool. There's a lot of tension on it that I'm pretty sure wouldn't be there if two colors were being used, but I need to make another infinite swatch to check it out. I was thinking of writing the pattern so it could be done in one color or two (i.e. and easy/more difficult version) but I think that they would have to be two completely different patterns if the tension is as different as I suspect it is.

What to do with this little gem I just made though? My first thought was a cup cozy. I could write up a quick little pattern for that! Damn it. If you don't have a Ravelry account, here's the gist via screenshot:


Like I said, reinventing the wheel (just published this month though, so closer than normal). Actually, my infinite swatch is a bit too small for your average cup of joe, and I think it makes a nifty bracelet:

Too dorky? I can't even tell anymore.

I love little projects you can do with your scrap yarn, so maybe I'll write this as a pattern.

On a completely unrelated note, I've been noticing a correlation between a car's make and how closely they pass me when I'm cycling home from work. This particular route is in North Berkeley, which consists of winding roads going up a steep hill with virtually no shoulders. While on a conference call, I made a little graph to demonstrate:
OK, let's break it down. The square is, on average, where the brand falls on the "Curve of Courtesy" (patent pending). The bars represent the scatter from that average, for example, Buicks tend to pass anywhere with a 2 ft. to 4 ft. leeway.

Subaru - I may be a bit personally biased since I love my Soobie, but these folks are just nice. They tend to slow way down and pull completely into the other lane, and once I even got a courtesy "I'm here" beep on the horn.

Beater - Originally ranked beaters the same courtesy as Subarus, but my housemate pointed out that the reason they pass slowly may be because they're maxing out their speed up the hill as it is.

Honda - Not overly courteous, but I usually don't feel in any danger either.

Toyota - Similar to Honda. Slightly more dick-ish. May or may not be related to uncontrolled acceleration in Camrys or Priuses (Priusi?)

Volkswagen - These guys are all over the map. I have no idea whether they're going to give me a wide berth or mow me down. Slightly terrifying.

Buick - Tend to pass pretty closely. I attribute it to the fact that most Buicks are owned by old farts (sorry Mom and Dad--call 'em as I see 'em) and they probably notice me and my day-glo yellow vest at the last second and have to swerve around. I understand that you're looking for the nearest Country Kitchen Buffet, but try to keep your eyes on the road.

BMW, Mercedes-Benz - Now we're getting to the true assholes of the road. These are the people believe that only cars should be allowed on the roads, because safely passing a cyclist or pedestrian might make them 30 seconds late to the gala benefiting Beating Up the Homeless.

Two-seaters - How do I say this graciously? These guys have small penises. I know I should feel sorry for them for that, but I'm too busy peeing my pants out of fear.

Porsche - You may be wondering why Porsche is in the negative region; I'm pretty sure that these dudes would swerve to hit a cyclist rather than avoid one.

Plumb out of luck

I honestly don't know whether the phrase is "plumb out of luck" or "plum", and the interwebs have failed to provide a consensus. I was trying to make a witty pun, sorry. I heard somewhere that puns are the lowest form of humor, but don't they always make you smile? Sure, it's in an "I'm so embarrassed for you" sort of way, but it still lifts your spirits in the sense that you're not the one making the cringe inducing joke. What the hell does the aforementioned phrase mean anyway? Doesn't "plumb" just mean upright and "plum" is an OK fruit that's a delicious addition to pudding? Maybe you're out of plums and you really wanted to make pudding, and so you're POL.

This rambling might be going somewhere eventually. I made my first CO/BO stretchiness test swatch last night, and pondered what my experimental set-up should be. I could pull on all of them to what I felt was their maximum stretch, but when I tried measuring a couple of times on the same swatch, the results weren't consistent. That makes the test qualitative--I can tell by the feel how relatively stretchy I think it is, but I don't have solid numbers to back it up. I felt that this experiment could be at least semi-quantitative, so the idea of the moment is to hang a plumb-bob from the corner of the edge to be tested and measure the vertical stretch.

Now the current problem lies in scoring a plumb-bob. If I was back in WI, I'd stroll into the lab and borrow one. I don't know what I'm going to do when(if) I graduate; it's so nice to have all kinds of limited use tools at your beck and call for that one time you actually need them. How often do you need an Dremel or an acetylene torch (please don't answer if it's going be disturbing)? Here in Berkeley though, I'm working on simulations, which means strictly computer stuff. The simulations work is also sometimes referred to as 'modeling', which never fails to amuse. When I tell someone I'm "working on a modeling project", they invariably get a look on their face that says "modeling for the cover of Crackhead Weekly?" But the upshot is, no access to tools. There are two guys in the group that do experiments with actual stuff instead of playing computer make-believe. But, full disclosure: I'm embarrassed to ask to borrow a plumb-bob because I know they're nice dudes and would go to a lot of trouble to get me one if there wasn't one around, and then I would feel bad about the fact that it's not even close to being for work. I have a soul, it's just a small one.

I also have another idea for a hat that I'm itching to get started on. It's inspired by a North Face hat I've been seeing on the slopes for a couple of years now--I like the idea, but naturally I think that I can do it better. Here's the hat I keep seeing:

I always imagine someone haughtily saying, "The Nawwwwwrth Face" with a British accent.

My goal: add a cute brim, bring down the gauge by about half (meaning stitches half that size) and make the whole shebang two interlacing colors. I think doing it fair-isle-style will beef up the thickness nicely, accounting for the decrease in stitch size (which I'm assuming is why a chunky yarn was used, for thickness). I've been batting this idea around in my head for a loooong while, so I'm going to take the plunge tonight and get started (in parallel with my stretchiness experiments, of course). My only regret--we're just about out of hat-wearing weather. I'm trying to look at it as plenty of time to perfect a kick-ass pattern.