Marching right along and here's to hats

Yesterday was both Saint David's day and also the deadline to get the pin cushions postmarked and on their way to Piecework.

After confirming that my local post office drew a short straw and was open 'til 4pm on a Saturday, I spent the morning and early afternoon writing up the entry information.

In writing up the list of materials for the cake & chair, I found that I actually did have a spare hank of the Needle Necessities Rachel Overdyed Ribbon -- hmmm, didn't really have to punt with the Rainbow Gallery Frosty Rays -- oh well.

Since I was dealing with deadlines, my printer decided to play hide and seek with the print queue. This printer is directly linked to theWindoze machine and that's both a problem and a solution to another problem.

The solution side is being able to print at all until I get a new print server or figure out why the current one goes into intermittent error mode. The problem side is that it is connected to the Windoze machine and the driver and print queue are annoyingly slow and/or flaky.

The apartment search for a shipping box was a two out of three bears experience -- too big, too small and not a one just right.

By the time I got back from box shopping, it was nearly 3pm and the day had gone depressingly dreary. I was glad that I'd sprung for daffodils to lighten the mood. My apartment, aka the vampire friendly zone, was so dark I needed open drapes and lights on just to pack things up -- pish.

The package was accepted into the tender mercies of the United States Postal Service at 3:33 pm Pacific time with an estimated delivery time of Tuesday.

Having sorted that, I went on a somewhat abbreviated walkabout with my latest project which is a return to the hats mode.

I had promised hats and mittens for the Cleve-burg crowd sometime back and I'd made some progress on the projects before the pin cushion obsession kicked in.

I've been very fond of knitted stitch patterns with a smocking element to them ever since I saw an article in Threads by Lynne Vogel in 1991. The article was reprinted in Colorful Knitwear Design if you're interested.

What I'm doing now is, in technique, more like the Tassel Pattern Stitch from Goldberg's New Knitting Dictionary or Smocking Stitch from the old Harmony Knitting Guides.

Like those patterns, I'm pulling a length/loop of yarn pulled from between two unworked stitches to essentially wrap those stitches. Unlike those patterns, I'm working it in the context of a diagonal ribbing.

What's been kicking my bum in working this is the oops of going through one of the stitches rather than between. This mistake is a subtle but not easily corrected mistake -- pish.

I'm a little concerned that the Paton's Decor I'm doing this up in is going to look ratty/pill-y before it's time with all the frogging and reknit my short attention span fingers have kept insisting on making this mistake over and over again.

It also seems to pooling/puddling a bit on one side and I'm trying to decide whether that's a live with it or rip it and rethink.