Fraaaah-deeeeeh!

(TGIF.)

I think I'm going to take some time off this weekend - I've been pretty disciplined about the "work on research for at least one hour a day" thing lately. And I'm tired. I give an exam today so I do have to grade that.

But I want some relaxation time. And I think it's time to plant my front garden again...it's getting cooler and it's supposed to finally rain again next week. (We might even get the first Canadian air mass of the fall, where the daytime highs are in the 60s. Bring it on.)

I've worked some more on the alpaca hoodie. I'm really loving the pattern and it seems to knit up fairly fast. I've probably got close to 10" of the back done already. I'm still contemplating buttons for this one. I do think the vintage glass Czech ones will be too heavy (and a little too prissy for a more casual style like this), but I want something distinctive. Perhaps I'll order another set of the antler buttons like I used on the Tilling the Soil vest. Yes. Antler buttons would be just right. And they'd be light enough. And they'd be a good blendy color.

I also have a design idea I might put into practice this weekend. Did you see TChem's pi hat? Well, it reminded me of an idea I had had years ago - for socks, actually - but never tried out. But I think I will do it for a hat. I have some bits and bobs of 1824 Wool left over from when I made the Bloomfield Throw. I am pretty sure I have 10 different colors that will go together. So I will assign one color to each number (0 through 9). (This will be a chance to test if I have any inklings of synesthesia - is 3 purple, or green?).

Then what I will do is knit either a watchcap or a simple ribbed cap, using the numbers of pi (the long-form pi (and really, you should visit that site, the picture on it and the reference made me giggle), not the "cheat form" of 3.14 that I tell my students is "usually good enough) to tell me what color to use - and how many rows to stripe. So if 3 is green, everywhere in pi that a 3 falls, there will be 3 green rows. So for example:

3 green
1 cranberry
4 black
1 cranberry
5 denim
9 terracotta
....and so on, until the hat is big enough. And I'll do the decrease rows "in pi" as well.

(links to more digits of pi - not the cheat that was on the website I linked above - can be found here)

The idea pleases me because - well, it's more subtle than TChem's hat. Not to take anything away from her accomplishment but I think I might be a bit inhibited from wearing a hat that literally had pi on it. But to make a hat that figuratively IS pi pleases me immensely. I could even do a "sister hat" to it (if I have enough yarn left over at the end) that represents e, the base of the natural logarithm.

And hey! "Numbers*" is on tonight! An auspicious time to begin my pi hat!

(*standard disclaimer: I REFUSE to use the "hip" spelling that makes a hat tip to leetspeek where a "3" is used in place of the "e")