I have no idea what I’m going to do with the current proliferation of hats, but there’s another one for the collection this week:

This one is knit from the yarn I showed in the last post; two different colorways of Gina from Plymouth Yarn Co. I used one skein as the foreground and one as the background, and knit a simple diamond colorwork motif, incorporating increases into the design so that the diamonds got bigger as I went. (In my head, I’m calling this one the Diamond Tesselations hat.) It was really fun to knit through the different colors as they came off the skein, and I like how the slowly changing colors add interest to the overall design. That really bright orange-pink band is one of my favorites, though I think it did need another strong color stripe to balance it visually (I had the yarn, but the hat didn’t need more length). This project really satisfied the craving for color that comes with a long winter, and I have only a tiny ball of the bright pink left.

Sadly, the Mushishi project needs yet another redesign. I like the reversible cables with this yarn, but I started to get uneasy about my yarn supply after just a few inches. Both cables and ribbing eat a lot of yardage, and the two together have outdone my single skein. After knitting about 5 inches of the scarf, I weighed the amount remaining and calculated how much length I could expect to get from what I have. It came out to about 30 inches, which isn’t enough for the scarf that I want.  So, it’s back to the drawing board on that one (again).

I did notice that the way the cables pull in tends to make the fabric fold in half; wouldn’t that be an interesting way to shape and add structure to a shawl collar? Something to tuck into my back pocket for a future design, maybe.

In the meantime, I think I need to go poke around in the stash again to see what else might be begging to end up on the needles.