Deadlines turn out to be intense but manageable, leaving me a bit of time to get some knitting done. The hat is progressing well, although I had to recast my yarn choice to something lighter. Two thicknesses of K2P2 ribbing in worsted seems too heavy for comfortable wear. So I dug down in my yarn boxes and came up with some lighter leftovers brazenly liberated about ten years ago from my mothers’ stash.

Unger Britania was a Shetland-type yarn of exceptional quality – lofty, soft, stretchy and supple. It’s native gauge covers the range between fingering (knit way down, compressing the loft) to DK (knit very loosely, letting the loft fluff out to fill in the stitches). It worked best at sport weight (6 spi). Mom had done an adult size Intarsia piece with it (possibly an Argyle) but ended up ripping it completely out and re-knitting most of the yarn into something else for a smaller individual. The leftovers are evenly divided among the colors with some virgin skeins, and a few balls made up of short lengths of about 5 yards each. Some fragments are longer, some shorter. I’m starting with the leftovers, spit splicing the short yardage pieces. I am also spit splicing color joins so that there will be no ends to darn in on this one-side/two-sided piece. My striping is rather haphazard. I knit until I run out of a color bit, then decide if I want to splice on the next same-color piece of unknown length, or if I want to shift to the next color.

I’m about a third of the way done, and due to the smaller gauge am more or less winging it, holding onto the dimensions and shaping proportions of the original pattern, but blissfully ignoring stitch count directions. For the record, I’m getting about 8spi in very stretchy K2P2 rib, on US #4s.

The result, given the 1970s color set and random width striping pattern the result looks rather Whovian. My target nerdpal will be ecstatic.

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