Success: 30 Hats in 30 Days!

I set a challenge for myself to knit 30 hats in the month of November.  With my hats in 3 shops, I need to keep my production up for the winter hat shopping season and this was a way to stay on or even ahead of schedule.  I did it!  It was close at the end, but I managed to knit a-hat-a-day.  On November 29th, with all 30 hats completed and logged into my handy dandy Excel spreadsheet, I cast on for a felt hat in a style that I've never made before.

I also made an effort to knit from the stash as much as possible and tore through several hundred yards, so I knit down the stash too.  However since part of knitting down the stash required me to purchase more yarns to go with the stash yarns, I didn't get too far out front of that.  But all in all, a fine effort.

Only one tiny problem - a good problem to have.  Almost as fast as I have been making hats, I have been delivering them to stores and they are selling!  Of course that is the point - I can't sell them if I don't have them!  Nor do they sell piling up in a nice stack in the studio.  And as I backed off the spinning, I have very little hand spun yarn to knit my always popular guy hats - so I am still a wee bit behind.

Thanksgiving weekend was busy here at the world headquarters of Smoky Mountain Fibers.  In addition to manic hat knitting, I did a bit of dyeing and carding and spinning.  I also visited a couple of my favorite local yarn shops (one on Black Friday - Hey, 30% off and I bought some lovely silk-merino spinning fiber for a sweater for me!), spun at the Locally Grown Gallery and shipped a healthy number of orders for the Etsy shop (Thank you very much!).

I also painted my bedroom, including 2 coats on the dreaded popcorn ceiling.  I'll spare you pictures.  Although I am very happy with the results, photos of dingy off white with drywall mud over the cracks  and photos of fresh off white aren't really that exciting to anyone other than me.

Tonight is spinning night at Friends & Fiberworks.  I'll be spinning some over-dyed blue-green that looks like a really iridescent peacock. A colorway that will never be duplicated, I can assure you.  Hope the yarn is half as pretty as the roving!