Barely Enough

When I go on the road, I like to take some travel knitting with me.  You know, something portable, not too difficult to knit, with little need for refering to charts or directions.  Before I headed to Columbus for Knitters Connection, I started a hat that I thought would be perfect travel knitting.

I spun the yarn myself.  And I didn’t make much.  There were two yarns.  One was a two-ply yarn of some lovely carded roving from Handspun by Stefania.  It was a blend of CVM and silk, and Stefania had dyed the fibers with indigo and osage.  A lovely, gentle light blue.  The second yarn was a combination of one ply of that same CVM/silk roving and the other ply texturally spun from a small amount of dyed Teeswater locks that I purchased from Wild Hare Fiber Studio.

Here’s a picture of the yarn with the locks:

I failed to record the amount of yarn I made.  Or, if I did, I lost the tags…

Even combining the two yarns, I wasn’t sure I had enough for a hat.  But I started one anyway.  I knitted the brim with an old stitch pattern called “Cayce” I’d found in a unidentifiable vintage knitting magazine.  I’ve used this stitch before for my Tattoo sweater (see blog entry January 23, 2011). 

I had more of the CVM/silk yarn than of the lock yarn, so for the brim I used only the CVM/silk yarn.  Then for the rest of the hat, I used both yarns, intermittently working stripes of the lock yarn.  I knitted the rounds of the CVM silk, and I purled the rounds of the lock yarn.  Then I applied three very cool buttons.

Here’s the hat.

Only after strong blocking did it comfortably fit my itty bitty head.  And here’s all the yarn I had left over.

By the way, I was so obsessed with the worry of not having enough yarn that I knitted up the hat very rapidly just to see.  I finished it before I left for Columbus, leaving me with no travel knitting for that trip.