Looking Up

Since my last post about how crappy my day had been, things have been looking better on the job front :::knock on wood:::. Thank you for the kind words in the comments. I hate to throw my little pity party but it was so nice to hear people encouraging me to just hang in there. I have to keep reminding myself that no job is perfect and I'm very lucky to even have a job. And, of course, knitting helps. Today, I actually came home feeling pretty energetic instead of falling over from exhaustion. Could it be that I have (finally) caught up on my sleep? Or maybe it's just that I've been walking out of work each night as soon as I'm off the clock (instead of sticking around for another hour or so) and leaving it all behind me. Probably a combination of both. Anyways, I was feeling revved up so I did some chores and then dyed a little yarn.

Pink spaghetti! The color is actually a bit darker in real life. It's still a shade of pastel though. I'm thinking of calling it Bubble Gum. Hoping to post this yarn and another shade I dyed a few weeks ago in the store soon.

Still knitting along on a stealth project for Project Hope (stealth because it appears to be working out and I don't want to jinx anything by talking about it). Also planning on making a hat out of the rest of this yarn:

I think I can get another out of what I have left. That would make 3 hats from this yarn! Oh wait, I never told you about the second hat, did I? Hmmm...well, I was reading Knitting Rules! by the Yarn Harlot and in there it talks about teaching people to knit by having them knit a rectangle and sewing one of the sides together. It's the same principle as knitting a scarf, just on a smaller scale. For some reason it made me really want to try that technique. So I did. And, of course, I made it a little too long (remember I've been on a tear of sub-par hat making).

I've been pouting a little about this hat since I had such high hopes for it. And it's a beginners technique for goodness sake! This is supposed to be fail proof!

I guess I should know I can mutilate any pattern no matter how simple at this point. But today, as I was trying on the hat for a little photo shoot, I decided to try turning up the brim a bit. I'd tried it before but for some reason I couldn't get the length of the brim just right. Today, however, the stars must have aligned just so because I think I got it...

Looks pretty good now! Hopefully I've broken my streak of bad hats because I kind of agreed to make one more... We had someone in our EEROP group develop carpal tunnel and wasn't able to finish several projects she had hoped to contribute. It's truly unfortunate but now I have a purpose for the mittens I made and the fair isle sweater with the too small neck (I still have to fix it but now I have a reason to).