I'm blogging late because I have been busy proofreading and correcting the knitting pattern for the spirally slouchy hat! There are totally amazing people on Ravelry who have test-knit the hat for me, provided wonderful feedback and been very, very patient with my maths glitches (oops!).

So if nobody reports a last-second problem, the pattern will go live tonight or tomorrow morning - and it will be available for purchase from here, from my website and from the Ravelry store. And I am totally excited about this!

Here is a preview of the hat, graciously modeled by Christiane from www.aecht-fraenkisch.de:

This is where (and what) I'm currently at:

That is the Seriously Slouchy Spirally Hat (or does Slouchy Seriously Spirally Hat sound better? I can't decide...) all knitted, waiting for bind-off. In this picture, you are looking at the inside of the hem. The lower edge is folding up to give a nice, scalloped lower edge to the hem, and then it roughly looks like this before binding off:



It's made with a contrasting band and bind-off at the lower edge. The funny wobbly-crumply shape is the hat in its pre-blocking state - this pattern really needs some blocking after it is finished. It will look a lot better and much more impressive after bind-off and blocking, I promise. (And I also promise you a picture.)

This very hat, though, needs to be bound off first. Which is what I'm going to do now.

And then I only have to wait for the pattern testers to deliver their feedback to get the pattern ready for publishing. Hooray!

After all the paperweight is off my back for a while ( it will be time for taxes soon - more paperwork), here are some things that are not really spectacular, but give me a nice feeling of something actually moving forwards.

First of all, these dropped-off stitch markers

  - and yes, I use bits of knotted silk thread and an old, single earring - these dropped-off markers mean that I have progressed on my second slouchy hat (with better maths for the hem this time),



and am now almost into the first round of ribbing. This means slipping half the stitches to a holder and knitting the other half. Just what happens here:


Then, there's that other idea that I have had. And now I am swatching - not spectacularly either:


But other things have happened, too. Non-knitting things. Like this:


This is where the seam on the tent is today. Which is almost one metre from where it was yesterday in the early evening, and that means actually almost two metres of stitching done, half by me and half by the most patient man that lives on Earth (I'm sure he must be the most patient man on earth, after all, he lives with me). Only a few metres to go on that first bit! And it looks as if there would be sewing time tonight as well. And tomorrow.

And finally... something spectacularly unspectacular.


They have been fired for a while and are now finally in my workspace. "They" are the ceramic disks that are supposed to go on an equally unspectacular stick and there to serve as a spinning whorl.
For those of you who are not recognising these whorls, originally they were made as the reference whorl of the Textilforum Experiment, and they got a lot of praise for running extremely well. However, the experiment whorls were not intended to be sold, and they were purely functional, including all rough edges and unsmoothed surfaces. These are made for actual use - with smooth edges and smooth surfaces. The whorls are made from modern clay, and with a modern technique - I'm using a specially-made little cookie-cutter-like implement. But that modern procedure is what makes them exactly alike and as close as humanly possible to the weight and MI of the original 12th century whorl, which is what we needed for the experiment. I will weigh them today to make sure they are all on a par, and then they are going into the Marketstall tomorrow.

More proofreading today. Why on earth did I write so much? Yesterday didn't go so well in terms of reading progress, so I'm hoping for a much better "pages done" number today.

Inbetween and to keep me motivated, I'm knitting a second version of the slouchy hat to test the new maths for the hem/brim part. My prototype hat does fit, but only after vigorous blocking of the hem, which was not what I had originally intended to need - but I wanted that hat, and I wanted to wear it, and if it could be made to fit... well. I am (obviously) very, very much a product knitter, not a process knitter, though I do enjoy the process.
I'm working the new hat in much bulkier wool than the prototype, plant dyed by Sabine in a beautiful, beautiful orange that makes you wonder every second whether it's a friendly, warm and light earthy hue or a sparkling bright dot of colour... and that makes it very, very pleasant to work with. (In addition to that, I am very happy to find that thicker wool on larger needles really knits up much quicker than fine wool on fine needles - even if I still knit slowly, tightly and on smaller needles than recommended for the wool thickness.)

A good while ago, I ran a series about medieval hairnets and netting, writing about my experiences and results from working netting both as a spiral and based on real rounds. And I wrote this:

I'd say that an unadorned, simple net might well be worked in a spiral, since it will take very hard looking to see that: In the crown section, there's too much thread on too small an area, and the lower end of the net, if stitched to a band or sporting longer loops for closure, will not be easy to read. For any net that will show different size mesh, colour changes or embroidered patterns, spirals are out of the game, because they are just irregular enough to show.

in that post back there.

For my suspicions about nets worked in true rounds because of colour changes, different-sized mesh and embroidery, I had a prime example in mind - rolling all those treats into one beautiful hairnet that I had already blogged about by that time - this hairnet:



I was, at that time, convinced that this so amazingly regular-looking hairnet must be made in rounds, not in a spiral.

Well.

I stand corrected, and many thanks to Cynthia, who studied the net much closer than I did. And gave me a heads-up on my error. Proof that I'm wrong (and that looking at the evidence much more closely than I did in that case is always the right thing to do) was before all of our eyes all the time, because even on that blurry picture, you can see that it was netted as a continuous spiral - if you look at the bit at around 3 o'clock:


Can you see it?

Maybe it's a bit clearer in this picture:


(This comes from HEINEMEYER, ELFRIEDE: "Zwei gotische Frauenhaarnetze." Waffen- und Kostümkunde 1 (1966): 13-22.) There's a jog right beside the upper edge of the little shield motif that is cut by the upper edge of the picture. The one without a partner by its side. And there might even be a single green thread going down from the last green bit to the next green bit, crossing right through the white bit. Which would be totally the thing to do if you couldn't be bothered to cut the green thread just for that little bit of white.

So much for netting in rounds... and I take back what I wrote, and now say:

While you might suspect that netting in the rounds would be more useful for nets with embroidery, different-sized mesh and colour changes, the busy overall pattern of such a net, made in fine threads, distracts the human eye enough from the slight irregularities of the jog that these are only seen when looking very hard or studying a net in detail.

(And now I'll wait for somebody else to prove me wrong again. Bring on your hairnet analysis results - I'm quite in the mood!)

Meanwhile, back in the lair...
In addition to proofreading and several instances of planning going on in the background, I have finished the hat which is currently blocking (oh why does blocking take so long!) and looks very funny in its being-blocked state; the pattern has been updated and supplied with some more instructions for the fancy parts; photos have been taken of some bits of the process; and if the hat fits perfectly after blocking (which I hope very much), I will be a very, very content knitter.

Proofreading has also progressed nicely, though I have some last pages to read (and the images to look at). And I have caught up with things far enough to start getting back on track with plans for next season's market stall additions... which means a library day. Which means coffee with a good friend in the break. After I did my batch of proofreading...

However, while I am looking at black letters on white paper, I can glance up and see the hat being blocked (and hopefully drying extra-fast), and you can have a look at it, too:

Somehow, during the last few days, I've been saying "oh I'm so blogging this" to a medium-sized bunch of things, only to forget what I wanted to blog about by the next morning when I sat down to actually blog. Well.

I am, however, blogging this, because it's blue and teal and nice and I like nice blue and teal things:


Which is part of a hat I'm currently knitting. Or, to be more precise, part of the lower edge of a hat I am currently knitting. Which will hopefully be finished and blocked and fitting me well and flattering me and keeping my head warm and my ears extra-toasty very soon. (And just in time for the next cold period, since I already missed the first one due to too-slow knitting.)
If it does all of the above, I do intend to have the pattern (yes, I did make a pattern) test-knit and if test knitters don't all run away screaming telling me that is totally not possible, I do intend to publish it on Ravelry.

Oh, and you don't even have to knit a swatch for the pattern. Or graft. (Guess which parts of the knitting process are not my favourites?)