What a picture is worth

This just isn't a hat. I don't know what it is, but the best word to describe it is limp. What do you call a small, limp, yarn Frisbee? I don't know either, but this is what it looks like:


The photo is taken from above because it has no depth. The whole thing is about an inch high at most: At Most! In process, the needles gave it a structure that the actual project itself lacked:


I can see now (ahh, hindsight, so helpful), that although I consider myself good with hats, changing too many factors at once is not a good idea, because when it goes wrong, I don't know where to tinker first. Was it the yarn? The starting from the top? The idea that it would be baby-sized?

To add to my frustration, I finished it (all but the very end) in the company of non-knitters who tolerate but Do Not Get my knitting, and would not have understood my angst in the slightest, so all I could do was quietly put it aside. And I had no other knitting with me. It wasn't my best moment.

Fortunately for the blow to my knit-esteem, I did have success with the other project I undertook this weekend. In doing some very necessary sorting through the utter chaos of my stash and knitting tools, I ran across an all-but-forgotten bit of knitting that I repurposed into a small birthday gift.

Last year, I started a project (still ongoing, in fact) of letters-of-the-alphabet squares for an afghan (I've done A-P, but it gets put aside a lot, like for months at a time). When I did the letter C, I didn't like the yarn I'd chosen, so I redid it in another yarn, but never frogged the first one. One of my coworkers (whose name happens to start with C) admired the first C, and it's her birthday, so I knit a quick plain (well, stockinette) square for backing, sewed them together, and stuffed it as a little pillow. Simple and cute, if I do say so.

More to the point, it turned out exactly as envisioned, which helped during the ensuing "hat" fiasco. Whatever gets you through the day.

In other knit news, today was the start of the charity auction at work. I was surprised to find that they put my two items into one lot: the ccr collection? Well, if anyone has been coveting my work and wants anything, just anything, made by me, they're in luck, they can have two for the price of one. But if anyone happens to want just one of these items, too bad, they have to take both, unless they bid in tandem with someone who wants the other.

This assumes a whole lot of interest, of course! We'll see how long I go before I check to see if anyone bids at all. After I finished the "C" pillow above, I thought perhaps I should have done the same with the logo square. There's that silly hindsight again. In the meantime, I'm back to knitting my nice, reliable, "I know it works" hat. Tomorrow, perhaps, the sock.

As for the pinwheel? Well, I don't know. It will have to be frogged, trust me. It's silly to blame the yarn, perhaps, but right now I don't feel like trying again with it. I'm thinking of just using it to make another square and sending it to Warm Up America in the Harlot's name, just to be done with it and get it away from me. It's so pretty, but I start to feel like we aren't meant to be together. I think we can manage a square together, since we did already, unless it was Harlot magic that made that work? If I can't even knit a simple square with it, we may find out how soy burns. Because that really would be the last straw.