The Dangers of Yarn Roulette

Tales from the Tangled Trenches, Part 2

Greetings and salutations, yarn lovers!

It is I, your wayward blogger and novice knitter, finally returned from the depths of Yarn Roulette Hell to update you on the epic saga of The First Hat I Ever Knitted ™.

Did I finish it?

Hells yes, I did!

Did it take me approximately a million years?

Also, yes!

But it’s done, I’m happy, and I’m going to tell you all about it. And then, and only then (because I’m a tease and I want you to read this whole post), I’ll model it for you.

(I mean, I suppose you COULD just scroll down, but that would a. be less entertaining, and b. hurt my feelings. Just saying)

If you’ll recall from Episode One of Meg Knits a Hat (aka Tales from the Tangled Trenches), our heroine (me) had to start this darn hat not once, not twice, not thrice, but four freaking times before she (I) made it past the tricky (for me) patterned brim and into the comparative paradise of knitting stockinette stitch in the round.

Note: stockinette stitch in the round may seem boring to YOU, but I like to watch Korean dramas, which have subtitles, and K-pop, which has lots of pretty people to look at, so less of a pattern is sometimes better, trust me.

I got past the brim and started knitting, and all was well…until I got about 3 inches up the hat, looked at my now-minuscule yarn ball, and realized that I had forgotten to knit a swatch.

Dear readers, please, please, please don’t be like me.

You see, I had been knitting loosely. Very loosely. Honestly quite inexplicably loosely. And now, as I looked at this clementine-sized ball of yarn, I thought to myself, “Self, there’s a decent chance that’s not going to be enough to finish this darn hat.”

Nice one, Meg.

You see, if I had just knit a darn swatch, I would have known for sure (or at least had a better idea) whether this single skein of yarn would be enough to finish this hat. But did I do that? No, no I did not.

So, I did what anyone else would do under these circumstances.

Ask an expert? No.

See if Allen and Kelly had a spare bit of No Care yarn in their stash? Lol. No.

I panicked and stopped knitting the hat for a couple of months. Duh.

When finally, wracked with guilt and fear, I went back to the hat (with Allen’s reassurance that Kelly did, in fact, have some spare No Care yarn)…

…I knit the whole thing in the span of a few days and had about a metre to spare. Ha. All that anguish for nothing.

So, it was a happy ending. But still. Don’t be like me. Save yourself the worry. Knit a swatch. My story WILL have a moral, darn it.

Here’s the hat! I love it a lot and I can’t wait to wear it this fall.