Chunky Knits

Square One
Originally uploaded by Project Pictures

Whenever you need a break, or just need something to make you feel a little better.. pull out the chunky yarn, I say. After sock yarn, nothing is more fun.

I've been trying to work through the skeins of yarn I bought early in my "stashing" career... the ones I purchased when I didn't know that one skein of bulky yarn wasn't enough to make anything out of, even if it is luscious and soft.

I picked up two skeins of Mirasol's "Sulka" yarn (50% merino and 50% silk). This is a fabulous soft-spun single that has 55 yards in 50 grams. It was on sale, and it was gloriously soft and what did I know? I figured out later that I would have needed to go back for... way too much to do a scarf or anything else. But hats, now, hats are great. I was going to do this hat alternating my two skeins (one is a lovely aqua blue and the other a soft tan). But then I remembered "Turn a Square" and I started looking into Noro yarns.

You see, Noro has many beautiful yarns and originally this hat is knit using one of them. It doesn't match my Sulka, tho. Luckily, my LYS carries Silk Garden Chunky -- a match all around! It's wool and silk, spun as a single, and well.. chunky. The slow color changes are what make the hat so fun, combined with the gradual shift of stripes that seem circular to stripes that appear to be square at the top.

They knit up in about a day and used exactly one skein of Mirasol "Sulka" and one-half skein of the Silk Garden Chunky. I actually ran out of the blue Sulka, but bound off the hat with Silk Garden and I don't think it makes a bit of a difference.

And now I have two fewer skeins left to be knit! Two fewer skeins that I had no idea what to do with. That makes me terribly happy.