Hats

Yay yay yay! My vacation starts today! I actually wasn't going to take any, but then the company shut down the entire office for the holidays for some financial thing having to do with vacation time.

Other things that made me happy:

One of my knitting circles has been knitting at an indie coffee store for nearly three years now. This week, we went and gave the baristas and roasters there a stack of hats we had knit for them. (Well, some of us knit six times more than all the rest of us, but it's the effort that counts?)

I got the idea about a month ago just as a fun and nice thing to do, given that we've been camping out in their store for so long, and, honestly, I really just wanted the excuse to make hats. I love making them -- they're small, they take less than a skein of yarn, there were two patterns I desperately wanted to knit (Koolhaas and Foliage), and it only takes me a few hours to finish one. Except I don't really wear hats. I adore all kinds of brimmed hats and the occasional cloche, but I tend to accumulate them and then let them gather dust, and I never wear the knit beanies.

Turns out my whim has paid me back tenfold, because it was just awesome going over there with everyone and our stack of hats, then watching several baristas immediately start trying them on. I have no way to express how happy it made me to see people actually going through stuff we knit and wanting the stuff! And trying things on! And attempting to do trades! Like, I helped make that! So cool.