I haven’t posted much about it on this blog, but I happen to be a knitter.

My partner is also a knitter (and a knitting designer). Knitting was actually how we met. It’s a really important part of our lives. My partner is a much more dedicated knitter than I am, though. As part of an effort to decrease the amount of yarn we have stashed in our apartment, he’s been tracking how many yards he knits each month, and let me tell you, those numbers are impressive (over 16,000 yards for the year, he tells me). Particularly when compared to what my numbers would be, if I kept track. (I have finished a total of six projects this year. He’s finished at least forty-two. And no, I’m not exaggerating.)

See, I have this problem where I want to knit all the things. So I cast on one thing that I’m excited about, and within days (or hours…), I get excited about something new, and cast that on…which basically means I currently have about ten projects in varying states of completion on different sets of needles scattered about the house. I also knit a lot less in the summer (because we don’t have air conditioning, and it’s hard to get my easily overheated self excited about working with wool when it’s 90°F outside). The last project I finished was a super quick project in July that I finished in under 24 hours. Before that, it was a pair of socks in April. (This problem is not really isolated to just knitting. I have attention span issues with most creative things I pick up. Some of it has to do with Bipolar cycles, but a lot of it is just the fact that I want to do ALL THE THINGS, and I don’t have time to do them all.)

I am an extraordinarily selfish knitter. I can count on one hand the number of people aside from myself that I am willing to knit for. One of those people is my seven-month-old nephew. I decided before he was born that for his first Halloween, I would knit him a Yoda hat. After he was born, someone else brought that idea to my brother and sister-in-law (whose wedding was Star Wars themed), and I promised them it would happen.

Halloween is fast-approaching, and we have a quick trip to Minnesota planned in the next couple of weeks. I decided last Thursday (which is the day of the weekly knit night at our local yarn store, which I have not been going to nearly as often as I’d like) that I needed to get cracking on this hat. So I bought the yarn, cast on at knit night, got about halfway to the crown…and realized that the hat was not only going to be big enough for my nephew (who was easily fitting into 9 month hats at 6 months), but it would be big enough for me. (Possibly for me AND my nephew at the same time.) I ripped it all back and started over.

And then I got distracted. My partner had been worked on this great hat that’s made out of sock yarn, and as I was working on the baby hat, I realized I had the perfect skein of sock yarn for a hat of my own: purple and black stripes, in a fiber blend that I felt was too nice to use for something that would go on my feet, that was part of the boatload of yarn that came into our lives after one of our knitting friends passed away last year. And I got excited about the idea of a stripy hat for myself. So I put down the baby hat, pulled out the sock yarn, and cast on.

The great part about knitting something with stripes is that it’s easy to find motivated to do “one more stripe,” and therefore finish the whole hat. Long story short, I started the hat on Saturday, and finished about 1am this morning. And it looks great:

(I don’t have a picture of me wearing it yet, because the friend I inherited the yarn from had a cat at some point, and I am allergic to cats, and since just working on the project made me very sniffly, I decided to give it a bit of a wash before putting it on my head. It’s drying as I’m writing this; I’ll try to get another picture up later today.)

Thankfully, I have today and tomorrow off from work (hooray, Jewish holidays!), and tonight is knit night, so I’ve got plenty of time to get the Yoda hat for my nephew cranked out. And now that I’ve satisfied my selfish knitting impulse with a nearly-instant gratification project, I’ll be able to focus on the thing that has an actual deadline…right?

Update!
Here’s me wearing the slightly damp hat: