Hat knitting gone loopy, and office cleanout

Two things I've learned already in the new year: Magic Loop is very helpful for hats, and it IS possible to muck out and rearrange my office space in one day even with several years of paper clutter amidst everything.

Re. the office, I'll post pictures when the Mission: Organization-style sorting boxes are gone, but baby, it's looking good! I need to look up how long to keep various types of financial records, and then it might be a good thing to get a paper shredder at last. I'm excited about how well this is going!

About the hat, this is the top-down fair-isle hat I started for myself. First things first: don't believe gauge and math. This hat is far too small for me. I just don't want to rip it out, so it's going to be a gift for a child in the family. Too bad, 'cause I like how it's turning out and I was inventing something I planned for me. But that's okay. Pictures later on that, too.

Anyway, I was using four (really five) double-pointed needles at first, until the top got big enough that I added two more dpns. That was annoying because of how it was divided up, so I added two more dpns. That would be EIGHT dpns in the hat! It was easier to knit, but harder to stuff in the zip bag for my purse.

So... last Thursday when I got together with Emily we hit a great knitting/yarn shop in her area and I bought the appropriate needle size of a 40-inch circular needle. For the next couple of days I winged it on this Magic Loop thing, thinking it was enough to pull out a loop of cable on the far side of the knitting. I'm sorry, that was just plain tough to knit! I finally did some more research online, reading the descriptions carefully, and figured out that it's really the magic pair of loops -- at least once you start knitting a round. Wheee! So much easier now, and therefore faster. Yay!

Even though we seem to be having a non-winter here in Oklahoma, a wildfire-warmth-and-wind winter, I hold out hope for at least an ice storm or a good freeze before spring. Therefore I plan to use my Magic Loop knowledge next in another project: making mittens for the boys and me. I got the yarn at the aforementioned yarn shop, and I want to use the alternating-yarn method with two different jewel colors to make the mittens thicker and more wind- and snow-resistant. We'll see. For now, I have a hat to finish.

And piles of papers to sort!