Jayne Cobb Hat

Last summer I got an email from Liz, who works for another tour company in town. She was organizing the annual silent auction for the local chapter of ATIA, the Alaska Travel Industry Association and wanted to know if I wanted to donate something to the silent auction, namely to design a hat for the highest bidder.  Being in the stressful middle of the summer, my knee-jerk reaction was, "Hell no!", but Liz admitted that it was a wholly selfish request she had made of me since she wanted a new hat and would make sure to be the highest bidder.

This development presented me with a much more palatable proposition. You see, in my eyes, Liz is pretty stylish and the thought of designing a hat for her seemed really attractive.  My mind was already swirling with ideas and I was excited to also eventually turn this into another design that I could release to the masses.

So, I agreed to do it and then immediately put it out of my mind.  Then came the day after the auction and my curiosity was getting the best of me so I inquired how much my design-a-hat donation had gone for....I can't actually remember how much (I think $80?), but what immediately caught my attention was that the highest bidder was....someone named Adam. Say what?!

I'm not sure how it happened that Liz was not the highest bidder, but I now had to design a hat for someone I didn't know...and was a little worried about it. I mean, what if they made outrageous demands of me and made me knit them a really long stocking cap that would take forever (lord knows, I didn't have the time for that) or a really complicated whoosie-whatsie style that I didn't know anything about?  My mind was again swirling, but not in a good way.

So, I got a call from Adam not long after to discuss the hat.  He told me he wanted the hat from the tv show Firefly, which I had never heard of.  He told me I would recognize it if I saw it and that I should Google "Jayne Cobb Hat". That did absolutely nothing to clarify, but I now knew the task at hand.  Pretty easy-peasy Stockinette in the round....even in my stupefied burned-out-from-the-summer state, I felt like I could crank this out pretty quickly.

But...I had to find just the right yarn and then just the right colors, which proved to much harder than I thought. I scoured Rav and found about a bajillion versions of this hat, which helped immensely in finding the right combination. I settled on Lamb's Pride Bulky and put in my order.

The yarn arrived just before my trip home to Ohio in October, so I was able to work a few rounds before I left.  And then I figured I would wait until I returned to finish it, which I estimated would take no longer than a weekend.  But then November arrived...and then December...and then January, and still the hat sat there unfinished.  I got a call from Adam in late January asking if I was almost finished and I felt so sheepish (why, yes, pun intended) when I told him that it was still not done.

I'm not sure what is taking me so long...oh wait, yes I do.  The yarn and needles are killing my hands, the colors are not my favorite, and that Stockinette in the round that sounded to wonderful during the summer was now boring me to pieces. Add all those things together and you've got the recipe for months of procrastination.

So, cue Saturday February 11, 2012.  Today is the day I have decided that the WIPs that have been weighing on my brain have got to be finished so that I can move on to other things.  Especially WIPs that only have a small amount left to do, like this hat.

I'm almost finished with the crown decreases and should have the earflaps and pompom finished tomorrow. And I can call this biotch finished! Yeah!

Up next on my WIPs-who-will-be-finished-or-else list is the Pineapple Lace piece that really should have been finished a year ago. I'm completely embarrassed that it's still not finished. But not for long!  It's going down. 

But first....earflaps.