Sweetheart knitting

This Valentine's Day I will be giving my sweetie the gift of handknitted goodness. He has been patiently hinting for a couple of months now that he would like a knitted hat made from my handspun yarn. After his initial hint, I spent some time looking through my ever-expanding stash of handspun yarns. Nothing jumped out at me as the perfect yarn for his hat, either because the yarn was too scratchy or the colors didn't seem quite right. At this point, I simply shrugged and thought that sometime in the future I would dye and spin something especially for him. To my surprise, last week he mentioned that he liked a skein of merino/cashmere/angora/tussah silk handspun (one ply is merino/cashmere/angora (60/20/20) and one ply is merino/tussah silk (80/20)) that I had hanging up to dry. Determined to have this hat finished by Valentine's Day, I quickly set to work combing through my collection of recent knitting magazines for an interesting pattern. Within minutes I had settled upon the Koolhaas Hat designed by Jared Flood that appeared in the Holiday 2007 issue of Interweave Knits. I like that this hat pattern has a connection to architecture in my native Washington state, and I like the way that the stitch pattern complements the fuzziness of the angora halo.