Since last January, I’ve been planning to go to Shetland Wool Week 2019. By this time next year we’ll most likely be back in the States, so this seemed my best shot. Getting to the Shetlands is no joke, even from within Europe, must less from the US.
But now, just a month away, it feels a lot more real and like it’s really going to happen. Plane and ferry tickets are booked (12hr overnight ferry – cheaper and simpler than the limited flights). I’ve had a hotel booked since Janaury (lots of places sold out already even then) but I needed to adjust the dates which Expedia won’t let me do – I have to cancel and rebook. So I decided to check out if anything else is still available now that we’ve got a shorter stay and this week I found an Air BnB that suites us better (for longer trips, the more days we have a kitchen to cook breakfast the better) so I need to cancel the hotel (which I can still do). Basically, most of the logistics are sorted out.
So I figured, I ought to get started on my Roadside Beanie. Its apparently become a tradition to have an official hat pattern (free) for each year of SWW. I was the kid who hated participating in school spirit days and rallies for highschool, which has led to a knee-jerk reaction at times that I won’t do whatever “team spirit” thing is proposed. But I know that actually, my childhood adversion was because I couldn’t honestly support those school spirit exercises in a school where I felt like an outsider who wasn’t really part of whatever was being celebrated and which I was being forcibly opted into (I had a supicious number of orthodontia appointments that overlapped with highschool auditorium rallies).
SWW is something I’ve chosen to do, and I’m going to be surrounded by people who also chose to do it. So I realized that I would actually enjoy being marked as one of the SWW tourists and fiber enthusiasts. Thus, I decided to make a hat.
Now, the hat requires 7 colors. I don’t really want to go buy wool right before a wool festival. So instead I looked to my stash. Did I have 7 colors of fingering weight wool well suited to stranded color-work? 2ply being best. Why, yes I do! I have the left overs from the blanket I finished last fall. Ok, so that had 14 colors, of which about 12-13 has usable amounts left. So I grouped them:
And now my hat is well underway. The sheep are finished and next up is the boats.
I feel just a little clever, because I thought ahead and picked my shade of “A” to be the one that better suites my skin tone, especially winter untanned skin… The more yellow peach is going to be a lot more flattering than the super pale pink. I really love how the color work ribbing came out.