In Which the Pirate Accidentally Knits a Hat.

In early spring, Michael told me that he’d lost the hat I made him some years ago, and one of his Fleeps as well. (For new readers, these are flip-top mittens. It’s just more fun to call them fleeps.) But he had another hat, so that was all right, and it was getting to be too warm for gloves anyway. Earlier this month we took a road trip to Boston MA and Providence RI, and of course we stopped at some yarn shops, including Newbury Yarns, where he found a ball of the right yarn in the right colour to knit his own replacement Fleep. And then something horrible happened: the hat he’d knit snuck into the washing machine.

So now he needed a new hat AND a new glove, and he was prepared to knit them both himself. I happened to have a ball of Cascade 220 (superwash, this time) hanging out in my stash, and offered it to him if he wanted to make a hat that would survive accidental washings. Or intentional washings, for that matter.

I also offered to give him a headstart on the hat, because he was going to knit the Fleep first. He knew he could knit the hat without my help or advice, but a glove is a little more complicated. So on Saturday, he got started on his glove and I cast on for a hat. I knit the ribbing, and I kept going, and by Sunday evening… well…

He’d gotten up to the part where he’ll knit the individual fingers for his glove, and I’d finished his hat. (To be fair, I did a lot of knitting while he was doing other things, like chopping up a thousand peppers for the relish we made.) Good thing I finished the hat, too, because when I dropped him off at the train station this morning it was only just above freezing. Autumn has finally arrived, even if the trees haven’t really started to turn colours yet.