Knitting slump

There are ups and downs to engagement with our beloved crafts, aren't there? Lately I've been having trouble on the knitting front. At home, I was working on my giant Sempervirens, but I also needed simple, portable projects for work and toting around. Then Sempervirens was banished to the freezer due to the carpet beetle crisis (see Yarn 911 and Pest Control), so I don't even have that to work on at home. It feels pretty jinxed, anyway.

After finishing three Laurus hats (above), I was feeling done with that pattern for a while. I studied my Ravelry favorites and queue, and cast on for a Swirl Hat the night before going to Washington, D.C., for the day. (I cannot go to the city without a portable knitting project!!!) The Swirl hat uses sequence knitting in a genius way. The sequence is 10 stitches of knit and purl. When your total number of stitches is divisible by 10, the pattern stacks up like rib. But by increasing it one stitch, you get a swirl that leans one direction, and by decreasing the original number by one stitch, the swirl goes in the other direction. The pattern alternates.

The designer calls for sportweight yarn, something I don't have hardly any of in stash. I chose some leftover Shelridge Farms Soft Touch Heather, which Ravelry lists as "fingering" but is definitely a heavy fingering. I made a sock yarn square out of it, and it was considerably bigger than the rest of my squares (and didn't get used in the final blanket). I grabbed the light green (official color is Willow) and cranked out this hat, with no recipient in mind.

One of my young colleagues saw me wearing another hat in the same color and excitedly asked if it was the one she'd seen me knitting recently. She also happened to be wearing that same shade of green that day. So I gave her the hat. It looks wonderful with her purple hair:

Not knowing what was next, I grabbed some more leftover Shelridge Farms Soft Touch Heather, this time in a deep purple called Loganberry, and made another one. This time I only did 3 swirl sections (I thought the green hat with 4 swirl sections bordered on too much "hang time"). It's fine:

And while I was working on those, I recalled that the red Bartlettyarn I made S a sweater from a few years ago was listed as sportweight. I have lost of leftovers so I banged out another hat:

So far the red and purple hats do not have owners. I may drop them into the box for the homeless shelter that's in my library right now (one of the student clubs is doing a drive).

While I was working on those hats, I kept thinking about what my next project would be. I thought using handspun sounded good, so I checked my queue and found I had planned to knit Raddle out of two skeins of handspun. I cast on for a small swatch and immediately saw that the colors run together. I confirmed this by desaturating them on my phone. Here they are in living color:

And here they are without saturation - they look pretty much the same!

This pattern won't show up here. Plus, the pattern sounded easy from the description, but after I bought and printed it, I realized that it has a chart and cables and garter in the round and is not at all suitable for my easy, portable project. So that was a big fail on both counts. I was so sure it was a bust that I only knit this far, and then frogged it and put the needles away.

What did I do? I grabbed a very old skein of sock yarn and cast on for another Sockhead Slouch. Gretchen gave me three skeins of this waaaayyy back in 2009 when she destashed them, not finding them to her liking. I used one skein to make socks for Boy 1 nine years ago. It'll make a handsome hat... for someone.