I’ve been trying to actually use my handspun instead of, well, hoarding it in bins.  I tend to treat my handspun as a finished project instead of like yarn to be knit (or crocheted, or woven), and it’s starting to overtake my craft room.

This yarn was one of my very first handspun skeins.  I had some undyed superwash merino roving that I had gotten from a friend, and I tried dyeing it using the instructions I found on the Yarn Harlot’s blog.  I was nervous about the roving floating apart and the colors mixing into a muddle, so I chose these instructions because they involved stuffing the roving into pantyhose in order to keep it from moving around in the pot.  I used squeeze bottles filled with Jacquard dye solution to paint the roving (right through the old pantyhose), wrapped the weird sausages in plastic wrap, then steamed them over boiling water.

It was about 4oz of fiber, and I spun it into a slightly thick-and-thin fingering weight 2ply yarn.  After photographing it and adding it to my Ravelry stash, I put it in a bin and forgot about it for awhile.

A couple of weeks ago, I was complaining to Dan that I didn’t have any good wear-over-bad-hair, not-too-warm-for-inside hats.  I rummaged about in my bins, rescued this handspun, and started looking for good free hat patterns.  The Sockhead Hat pattern is a great quick pattern for fingering weight yarn, and it knit up pretty quickly despite the fine gauge.

I reduced the slouch factor by about 1″ in the length of the crown, but I completed the decreases at the top of the hat as written in the pattern.  All in all, a great little pattern for using up precious yarn – I’m so excited to be working more with yarn I’ve dyed, spun, and knit myself!

Also, while I was shooting this hat I had a little bit of help from Annie:

She’s definitely more than 10 years old now, we should probably stop calling her “Kitten” someday.   🙂