Fluffy

Whew, my smart husband who is not usually given to discussing small-tail possibilities is taking the coronavirus very seriously. Should we maybe talk about knitting instead?

I got the second installment from the Colourwork Club in the mail earlier this week, after a pretty ridiculous amount of anticipatory happiness. Would it be the Vibrant colorway or the Neutral colorway? (You can pick a single colorway in advance if you want to, but Alex gave me the one-of-each membership. Next month will be Neutral.) I received an electronic version of the pattern before the parcel arrived, and I pored over it in advance. I found myself on the horns of a dilemma.

Many knitwear designers sketch out "snowflake" designs with eightfold symmetry. This has long bothered me. This hat design had a six-pointed snowflake at the crown, but only in size M. I can make a size M work for almost anything, friends, but headgear is an exception. I have a giant whopping head. It is an XXXL head. I used to feel somewhat self-conscious about this configuration but now I just say it is for holding all of my brains. (Because people in this country love smart women, as evidenced by Elizabeth Warren's -- oh, wait. Never mind about that right now.) But the largest size would yield up a 7-point snowflake. Team SCIENCE and Team CLOTHES-THAT-FIT waged a brief war inside my brain, but my math-loving children told me about the existence of theoretical seven-point crystals and OKAY I cast on the largest size. On the recommended needles, because I thought it likely that this would give me a looser gauge than the designer.

But...do you know what happens if you cast on a giant hat at a slightly larger-than-recommended gauge? Yarn crisis, that's what. I pulled out the kitchen scale and weighed my shrinking ball of blue yarn at regular intervals. I threw in a bonus stripe in Exactly Right Acid Green to save a little more blue for the crown. I switched to smaller needles and started the crown decreases a little earlier than the pattern told me to. 

I think it is going to work out. Coronavirus may shutter our schools and sicken our elderly and deplete our 401Ks (seriously, WSJ, I feel like every coronavirus headline in your paper is about the economic impact and not the human suffering and epidemiological uncertainty), but at least I should have a charming Elsa-blue hat to wear to the apocalypse.