Hold onto your hats...

This might be a long one.

I keep hearing people whingeing about this whole spring forward deal, but I love it. I can already tell it's going to do wonders for my blogging, since I get off work and it's (gasp) light out. I love writing a knitting blog, god knows I have way too much to say about knitting in general and if I didn't have a blog I would be going around making my friends admire my yarn and squish my hats. (Oh wait, I do that anyway.)

But I hate taking pictures. Hate it. I don't think I'm a bad photographer, I've gotten the occasional compliment, but I am definitely a reluctant one. I love photographs, but I'm always the one bringing my camera to places, taking two pictures and then trying to foist it off onto someone else. So convincing myself to go out and take pictures for the blog has always been a challenge for me.

Today, though, thanks to this miraculous light, I hauled my butt up, went out to the wooded median in F parking lot (my prime picture location) and took some overdue shots.



This is my go-to hat lately. It's the fantastic Marsan watch cap pattern, which I've been knitting obsessively lately. The yarn is recycled from a thrifted J.Crew sweater, my first time successfully frogging a commercial sweater for yarn. I had tried it before and hated it, and hated it even while I was doing it this time, until I read somewhere that a lot of commercial sweaters are seamed together with little crochet chains. All you have to do is find it, pull the end, and the chained seam totally unravels. It's like a miracle. This totally beats my snipping-each-individual seam stitch method, and I'm definitely going to try this more in the future. I don't know the fiber content because the sweater didn't have a tag, but it has little fluffy hairy bits in it so presumably it's natural. I held the yarn double for this hat since I wasn't sure of its strength.





I bought the yarn for this second hat as a wee birthday present to myself. I've wanted this colorway for ages, but this was my first time using Noro and seeing it knit up isn't quite as exciting as in the skein. I'm not too crazy about the lime green and the hunter orange right next to each other. I might frog it and turn it into a couple Turn a Squares. On the other hand, it is spectacularly awful with my orange scarf and orange sunglasses, which is an admirable quality in itself. As I came of age in the early 2000s, I usually have a deep-seated aversion to orange, having worn way too much of it when I was 12 (I owned, in 2001, an orange Old Navy visor. I feel that was the definitive fashion article of the times.)

Despite this healthy aversion, I have, apparently, become the sort of person who wears orange. Not only that, the kind of person who mixes orange and lime green. I have been horrified to discover, in fact, that my most common color combination these days is orange, green and purple. When my lovely friend Sue pulled out a stack of miller mitts she'd knit and let me pick a pair, and I immediately grabbed these, I knew I had a problem.



I wear, nearly every day, my green vest, orange scarf and purple skirt, and now these mitts. They're absolutely gorgeous (and Sue found the yarn at a garage sale...she has major garage sale mojo) but how, exactly, did I become the kind of person whose token color combination is orange, green and purple? Shouldn't there have been some sort of warning signs?

Ahem.

Why, look at that, I actually have a picture of me wearing the Noro hat with my orange scarf and sunglasses, memorialized for all time.



I look like some sort of technicolor Ted Kaczynski. I would give a disclaimer that I'm actually much more svelte than I appear, but I'm wearing so much f#%*ing clothing in that picture that I'm not even insecure about it. (One of my favorite hobbies is listing the number of layers I have on, but having discovered that few people find this as entertaining as I do, suffice it to say that I am wearing two hats.)

That's me and my mom at an Iditarod party in Alaska. (For those of you who didn't grow up in Alaska and have an Iditarod unit in elementary school, the Iditarod is a sled dog race. The sled dog race. It runs from Anchorage to Nome, memorializing the historic event you have possibly seen portrayed in the fine piece of cinema that is Disney's Balto. It has a ceremonial start in Anchorage, then starts for real in a town called Willow. On the ceremonial leg, time doesn't matter, so mushers are just touring through town for fun. One of my mom's friends has a house right on the ceremonial route, so he throws a big Iditarod party every year.)

And guess who stopped at the party?



That's right. Lance Mackey. Lance Mackey is a really, really big deal. He's pretty much a living legend. The two biggest sled dog races are the Iditarod and the Yukon Quest, and they happen within weeks of each other. Everyone always thought it would be impossible for a single musher to win both of them in one year, but Lance Mackey won them both, in the same year, two years in a row. He's also a cancer survivor. On top of this, he is really nice. Like I said, big, big deal. (I may also be secretly in love with him, but try not to think about that because it freaks me out.)

But, my friends, my fellow knit bloggers, what's missing from that picture? Hmm? Anything?

A SOCK. A SOCK IS WHAT IS MISSING FROM THAT PICTURE. Lance Mackey stopped, right in front of me, was taking pictures with people, I had a sock WITH ME and I didn't even think to ask him to hold it. DAMN. This was without a doubt one of my worst moves ever. I know he would have held it. Lance Mackey is kind and good. Lance Mackey is in no position to judge other peoples' weird hobbies. He would have done it. To be fair, the sock was pink and lace, so it might have been a little weird, but I know he would have held it. I don't know if I will ever forgive myself for missing this opportunity. Damn.