Several years ago, I taught myself to spin cotton on a wheel. It worked well on the spindle but the wheel was still a matter of severe practice which I did. I got out my stash of naturally coloured cotton and began with the first kilo. After a while a got the hang of it and so in the end, I had about 900g relatively thin spun cotton. I plied it and now it was something like 28 wpi. Perfect for a scarf. Which I began knitting. only to decide, I didn't like it. I began something new, ribbed it, and gave it with a Elizabeth Zimmermann Pi Are Square classic a third chance.
I still didn't like it. I like the pattern and there is some mohair from a friend's goats lying around which will be perfect but not the cotton. It didn't feel right and it didn't look quite right. And so it went. And I decided to skip the modern techniques and go back to where cotton came from: weaving.
Some 2.5 metres long, about 35 cm wide and with some indigo silk as added interest. Plain weave on the rigid heddle, braided fringe and simply just the way it should be. Cotton is for weaving. Just the right look and feel.
Hubby is commuting every morning to Frankfurt. And sometimes he forgets things on the train. This time, it was his We Call Them Pirates hat. I knit the hat some 5 or 6 years ago and Hubby loved to wear it. And was really down trodden when he realized he lost it. No problem, I told him, you'll get another one.
Because my yarn is finer than the original one and I knit rather tight, I added a ladder on each quarter to make the hat a tat wider and added some more rows at the bottom to make it a tat longer. I loved his proud smiling face when he put it on for the first time.