two hats

Things have finally settled down a bit after our whirlwind visit to the States for the holidays, so I was finally able to finish to WIPs that had been lying around for the last month. The first was yet another Thisbe hat, knit in madelinetosh Eyre, in the wren colorway. I ordered this skein last summer, and this was the yarn I'd wanted to knit the prototype for Thisbe in all along, but I hadn't taken into account the shorter yardage OR the extreme dearth of Eyre on the internet. Out of sheer desperation, I posted on the Ravelry Madelinetosh community forum, and found someone within 2 hours who not only had an extra skein of the elusive yarn, but who was willing to mail it to Japan. It was an awesome, Ravelry-affirming moment!

ps, please excuse that random strand of hair looking all weird. It's like that in *every* photo :( 

I've heard rumors that Eyre has been discontinued, which is a huge shame, because it was the most beautiful single ply yarn I've ever worked with - soft, drapey, luminous, with no piling so far. If I wasn't on my strict no new yarn policy, I'd be scouring the internet trying to stockpile it (Okay, so I did buy one more skein of it when I walked into Article Pract in Oakland and saw a big pile of the yarn in the same colorway I'd been so desperately searching for back in Japan - but that was before January 1st, so it doesn't count. Right?).

The other WIP was another excuse to play with a gorgeous yarn, this time a skein of Malabrigo Rios. Living in Japan, I'm a bit slow to check out new yarns, but was finally able to order a skein in sunset. I doubt I'd be able to say anything new about this yarn, but at the very least, I can add my voice the the chorus of praise: the yarn withstood repeated frogging with no splitting or piling, and is amazingly soft.The hat ... I'm not so sure about. It's not been blocked yet, so I'm withholding judgement for now. I lost my notes but am working on re-writing them up, and I totally fudged the top decreases (I am amazingly lazy when it comes to knits for myself) and need to sort that out too, if I were ever to make another.