The Crafty Fucktard weighs in

This will not, as promised, be about the Crafty Fucktard's recent attempts to take hir knitting on the road. Instead, the Crafty Fucktard would like to discuss a recent conversion in hir way of thinking on the subject of hats.

On the road to Wenchville for Thanksgiving, I brought my basketweave scarf as well as the Skully project. Somewhere around the Quad Cities, I decided that I was fucking DONE with that scarf. No, it wasn't the 68" in length specified, but to my Crafty Fucktard's delight, I've never been the pattern's bitch. (As an aside, I learned after knocking out the six rows of seed stich that I had no scissors on me, and that last stitch stayed on the needle, mocking my ill-prepared ass until I unearthed the multitool with a knife on it from under the passenger seat.)

The scarf is lovely: Big Baby's twisty Alpaca in a soft green-grey-blue, which really held up to the pattern better than I was expecting. I'd initially bought it to make a ribbed scarf, but decided "BORED NOW!" and went for the more complex pattern. Of course, that pattern switch meant that I found myself having purchased nothing like enough yarn at the Studio in KC. I went trawling on line and found a place in Manhattan who carried my color, thankfully. Let us never speak of dye lots. Lovely as the scarf is, it's not really wide enough to pull off the Virgin Mary headwrap so vital to emerging from Chicago's winter with ears intact. So clearly I need a hat.

Wench was kind enough to lay out her pattern stash for me, and we agreed that we were kind of digging Jo Sharp's Piper hat. Part of its appeal was that the pattern called for some double points and, therefore, seemed not to be a victim of Jo's previously undiscovered fear of knitting in the round. Seamed hats are whack, Jo. Never forget it. As Wench sped for the oxymoronic downtown Suburbia, I looked more closely at the pattern and realized that the hat actually was knit flat on straight needles. The double points? For knitting an I-Cord Head Belt and SEWING IT ON as a faux band/crown delimiter. Jo, Jo, Jo, seek help.

But Jo has dark mojo, though, and sensed that Crafty Fucktard was indulging in some smote-worthy hubris. This is my verbose way of saying "My hat is cursed."

First fucktarded moment: I decide I'm just going to buy DPNs. I don't feel like figuring out what size circular I want and I am laboring under the delusion that DPNs will be more generally useful. So I pick up a set of size 7 Brittanys (I love me some Brittanys) and somehow fail to notice that these are about 4 inches long. I was going to end up casting on 42 stitches to each of 3 when I decided on a different non-CF-induced pattern. Good luck with that. Two rounds in, a pinky's worth of stitches leapt off the needle and raveled before I even had a chance to notice. That would be frogging the first.

Last night, back in my home, I decided that I was going to shun the metric assload of work that I have to do and start on my hat anew on my size 7, 16-inch clovers. Far too lazy to dig my tape measure out of my suitcase or whever the hell it is when it's at home, I decided that it would be genius to measure out my tail for double cast on by using the diagonal of my 14-inch iBook's display.

Spouse: You're knitting a screen cosy?
Me: Shut up.
Spouse: Seriously, what are you doing?
Me: I need about 66 inches of yarn tail. This is 14.
Spouse: Is it exactly 14?
Crafy Fucktard: It doesn't need to be exact! SHUT UP STUPID HEAD!

Naturally, I ended up with a tail that was at least 17 inches too long and getting the fuck in my way. But I knit and I knit and I knit, round and around. I went to my Zen knitter place, thinking how nicely the shadings in the Inca Alpaca were turning up in a simple stockinette and how cute the roll brim was. I'd probably knit about an inch and a half of it when I decided it was time to turn in. In trying to put the project away more neatly than is typically my wont, I noticed that the odious tail had gotten pulled through somewhere along the line in my work. So I did what all Crafty Fucktards would do and yanked on it. It was as if a dozen stitches from a dozen different rows cried out and suddenly were dropped. Poor little hat looked as though it had wandered into Angeltiger's path in San Andreas at a particularly nicotine-deprived time. Don't worry, I put it out of its misery before I went to bed.

At this point the hat should, in all deference to its ded-resurrected-ded-resurrected history, should be Zombie themed.