Last year I was so enthusiastic about entering my spinning and knitting into the local agricultural show, I even spent many weeks at Spinners and Handweavers trying to convince them all to enter as well. 

This week I was shamed to realise that I have nothing to enter this year and the show is next weekend.  So on Friday, in a weird fit of optimism, I trotted down to the showground and filled in the entry form for knited garment made from handspun wool and a skein a handspun wool.   They have to be delivered at the showground by Wednesday night.

I suppose it was not only optimistic, but foolhardy, since I had a thought of entering a knitted beanie, and I had a thought that it would be a colour work beanie, and I have never knitted with two colours before, and I didn't have a pattern so I had to design the beanie as well.I determined on Friday Night that I am capable of dealing with two strands of yarn at a time, a comforting thought given my aim. And I discovered that designing the colourwork pattern in excel is a billion times faster and better than doing it on graph paper.  I used the Bea Ellis hats and Hello Yarn's Pirate Hat as inspiration, but pretty much nutted it out for my self.  I especially like the striped top.

Saturday was taken up with Kayaking, but today, with the help of the Cricket on the telly, I sat on my bum and knitted.  I knitted until my ribs hurt (I think I hunch over or something), I knit until my hands hurt and I knit until I finished!!

The hat is sized for a small baby ... well I think it is... the last small baby I held was my sister and she is about to turn 14.  So the size thing is a guess.  If it is too small, I'll call it a doll hat and be done with it.  I dyed the orange yarn and spun both yarns.  The white yarn is from the skein that one the prize at last year's show :-) 

The next two evenings will be taken up with spinning.  I want a new skein to enter as well.