Remember when I said I swatched a lot…I really do mean it.  I showed you the first swatch the other day, the one where the yarn was a tiny bit too fuzzy for the sort of stitch definition I wanted.  Next up was this lovely yarn from Green Mountain Spinnery.

It’s hard to tell from the picture, but it’s a good bit firmer in person than the Infinity Shawl was.

Alas when I swatched, the fabric I was getting wasn’t what I wanted either.  It’s a bit pricklier than what I can comfortably wear as a hat (my forehead is weirdly sensitive), and it’s not quite as cohesive as I’d like when knit up this way, so it’s not the right choice either (once again, for the record, saying ‘this yarn isn’t a good fit for what I want from this project’ is not the same thing as saying ‘there’s something wrong with the yarn’…the yarn is awesome, it’s just not what I’m going to use right now).

I think at this point, the right choice is going to be to swatch the original Hedgehog Fibres yarn and do the math and see what sort of cast on I’d need to make that feasible.   It won’t be a fast project, but it could end up being the right choice…

But what I want you to keep in mind here is that I’m learning this from little tiny swatches, not from big giant hats.  If I’d cast on for a hat and knit the first 5 inches of ribbing and then started with the pattern stitch, I’d be so invested in it that I’d probably keep going, even though it was the wrong yarn.  But because it’s just a few minutes of swatching, I’m happy to pull it out and start over until I find a really great match.  I promise promise promise that swatching saves time in the long run, and it dramatically increases the chance of ending up with a really awesome final project.