Azucena Hat

Because of circumstances *completely beyond my control* (that would be otherwise known as an online sale at madelinetosh too good to resist, which turned out also to be too good to be true, but worked out all right in the end, and a local yarn store going out of business and selling everything in their overstuffed basement at $1/skein(!!)) I have way more yarn than I did a few weeks ago, and quite tempting yarn it is.  I've been working on getting it all into Ravelry, and trying to update some of my finished projects there too, but what I wanted to talk about here is the hat in progress.

This is the lovely Azucena Hat, made out of some grey alpaca from the aforementioned yarn store going out of business sale. It's almost finished, about to be ready for the top decreases, but the thing that I wanted to mention is the hair tie around the middle, which is a cute little trick that keeps the stitches from wanting to fall off the ends of the double pointed needles nearly as much.

Also, the chart as printed is quite faint, so I've been tracing over the chart symbols with a pen in order to see them better. This turned out to have an unexpected double benefit, even if it is slightly tedious, because I've been switching pen colors after every few rows, and my eyes can track the rows much more easily that way.

It will probably be finished tomorrow, and then it won't look quite so much like a scrunched up rag. Lace is just like that though.