What A Difference A Gauge Makes

I've been playing around with gauge while knitting the hats for the K4 project out of variegated yarn. A lot of the yarns will swirl around the hat in stripes, but the Mexicali variegate with six colors tended to work into vertical stripes. That got me wondering what would happen if I knit a little tighter or a little looser. The hat I was working on at the time was swirling to the right, so I tightened up my gauge - not a lot, just 3 or 4 stitches over the usual 66 that I use for one of these hats. The result was sort of WoW!..



The colors started moving to the left, then I loosened up a bit and back to the right they went. I tried it with some red, white & blue variegated and got this:



The one I'm working on now is in the same yarn as the first one, but I'm holding the yarn just tight enough as I work that the stripes are going straight up.

DH's Fuzzy Feet are done - I had a lot of trouble with the kitchener stitch grafting this time around, one of those 'nothing is going right' moments, but the toes are closed and I'm hoping that after they're felted that no one will be able to tell what a mess I made of it.



The yarn from the aran sweater has been washed, rinsed and hung to dry. Here it is before all that happened.



I counted the rotations of the swift on the smallest skein and then measured the skein and did a little math. There's approximately 150 yards in that one and the other four are all at least double that size. I'm thinking that the Aibhlinn takes less than 800 yards and I probably have enough of this cream color wool that I could use it double if necessary to make gauge. Stay tuned.