At the weaving/spinning shop, the roving was in a basket intended as practice material for beginning spinners. I loved the colors, even tho' they looked a bit garish in their raw state and I shamelessly begged them to sell it to me. As I suspected, it spun up into a beautiful yarn, which in turn almost demanded that I knit something in Entrelac. I had only one ball of the yarn, barely 80 or so yards, so the project had to be small. The hat seemed small enough, so I began by knitting a rectangle in Entrelac and when it got big enough to fit around my head, I planned to knit the top closed with the classic shaping for hats--k2tog every 10th stitch, one row plain, k2tog every 9th st, etc. But--oops--when I got to the end of the rectangle, there was no yarn left to close the top of the hat and I had no more roving to make more yarn. My only hope was to try to dye enough yarn to match. I came close but, as they say, no cigar.
I was using some already-dyed roving and adding Kool-aid color to intensify the original. In other words, I started with a pale blue roving and dunked it in a blue Kool-Aid bath, and a pale pink roving dunked in a (what I thought was) pink bath. Both colors were way off the mark. The blue was more navy with a small hint of green; the pink was red! But with judicious blending I was able to at least approximate my original colors with the exception of the deep, clear blue. As you can see in the picture, the top melds with the body, but won't bear close inspection. But then, I wouldn't expect anybody to rip the hat off my head just to examine whether or not the top matches the rest of the hat. On the other hand, this is near Portland, OR, whose new city motto is "Keep Portland Weird" so anything could happen, including an overly-inquisitive hat inspector.
On a side note, this particular hat has at least one admirer, almost to the point of embarrassement--she keeps hinting that I should sell it to her. I had originally intended it as a chemo cap, but being wool, it can't be donated for that purpose. That's okay, I can always make other hats, and this one I am beginning to like more and more, and suspect it will become the hat of choice for winter weather.
