Saturday Sky and Stranded Stash Knitting

This post is image heavy; sorry for the unwieldiness of the image sizes. I shrunk them down quite a bit but was losing too much detail in the process.

You would think with sunlight this bright and in very limited supply this time of year, I would be warmly snuggled up inside the house, knitting away on scarves and mittens.

Because we are finally getting normal winter temps (is that a good thing?) ~ below 30F during the day, and below 20F at night, there was still a bit of ice on the trees and bushes that hasn't melted in the sun.

Instead of staying warm and productive in the house, I wasted spent the daylight hours outdoors, freezing my arse off, taking these:

I love the chiaroscuro in this shot as well as in some of the others in a post from earlier this week:

Saturday Sky notwithstanding, you came here for the knitting prOn, so finally an FO. I also love working with color when I knit. Since I do have a stranded knitting button on my sidebar, I guess I need to show some progress with colorwork, and as I haven't touched my mittens since the initial cuff for mitt 1, here, at last, is some finished work.

Sorry this one is so dark. I shot it indoors at twilight without a flash so I could keep the blue light emanating through the window blue instead of black. When I used the flash, the light through the window washed away to nothingness. Anyway, I took this cotton Takhi from my stash (yes, my stash!!!):

and turned it into this:

Here is the inside stranding:

Project Details:
Pattern: Baby Hat
Yarn: Takhi Cotton Classic II (100% mercerised cotton from Greece) in purple, shades of green, mustard, orange, and brick
Needles: Brittany DPNs, size 5
Modifications: increased the size per my swatch to fit the head of an adult.

Too bad my swatch and FO don't quite have the same tension. Although I love cotton FOs more than wool (I can't believe I just confessed that in writing), I truly despise dislike knitting with cotton. I am never able to keep my gauge consistent; the stuff is just too slippery for me even when I use wooden needles, which are a bit grippier than metal ones.

Going down a needle size didn't seem to work, as it felt as though I would snap one of the needles. Next time I use cotton to make a hat, I will have to decrease the number of stitches I cast on so that I can get a better fit.

I gave the hat a quick soak and a ride in the dryer, hoping it would shrink up from its ginormous size, but to no avail. Well, at this size, I can use it to keep all my hair inside the hat, which should add some insulating warmth in winter. All that's left to do is weave in the ends, and I'll have a cheerful bed hat if nothing else.

And, yes, sadly, now that we have more normal winter-like temps, it does get cold enough here to wear cotton hats to bed!!