FO: Foliage Hat

Hello! I've missed our fireside chats as of late. I've had some adventures, and I'm planning more, and eventually there will be pictures of everything. I have a hard time sitting down and collecting my thoughts at times, and I'm just going through one of those phases. It doesn't help that I've taken thousands of pictures in the past couple weeks, and I'll probably take hundreds more before the weekend is through.

When I go back through the years of archived photographs I have, I find it really amazing how the switch to digital really influenced my style. Back when I had my big clunky Minolta SLR and film and the cost of developing and printing was not cheap, I shot so sparingly. Like, life events were marked by just a photo or two of carefully timed and composed shots. When I made the switch to digital, I shot in much the same fashion: early trips abroad were marked by a few photos here and there of something interesting I saw, and I was always a bit worried about running out of battery and memory (those early digital big cameras were battery beasts, especially in the cold). So now that memory is cheap and the camera is dependable, I've been insane. I'm surprised that the shutter button on the camera isn't worn down to nothing, or I've done some permanent damage to my right index finger. And, being me, I have to spend some time whittling down those thousands to a select few that I thought were decent enough to share. I really dislike it when people are all, "here, see all the pictures I took" and they leave in all their duds, blurry, out of focus and not really illustrating much of anything, and you are left flipping through dozens of pictures of their hotel room in Fiji or the view from their balcony overlooking the parking lot in Lisbon, searching for a hint at what really happened on their trip. Booooring.

Anyway.

Here's a hat I made.

The process of springtime has been quite slow all over the world it seems. I'm still quite chilly here, especially at night. I half-heartedly put away my winter coat only to pull it back out again, and I watch the sad struggle of the cherry trees trying to blossom in what amounts to November. I keep churning out hats, and recipients keep grabbing them up and they are getting wear despite it being the time of year where you start to think about a pedicure.

The pattern is Foliage from Knitty.com. Easy lace, I made it with a bit of ease as to be slouchy. It's blaze-orange Cascade 220 tweed, which is an excellent fashion accessory if you live near the woods in October or November in the states. I've found that hats are idea gifts, since I can pack them flat in a big envelope and I don't have to deal with a customs form. Practical and slightly lazy, which is just my style.