Hat for Mum

When I was really little and had just started knitting, I had a flash of inspiration to knit my Mum a scarf for Christmas- regardless of the fact that I only had one small skein of yarn in a hideous off-orange color and made this decision with a week to spare. Predictably, I ran out of yarn and Mum joked for years about the Christmas when I gave her 1/4th of a scarf.

My knitting got much better over the years, and as an adult I was able to go out and buy my own yarn instead of scrounging around for whatever we had laying around the house to avoid spoiling the surprise. I picked up a lovely skein of Yarn Bee's Hand-dyed Tonal yarn in the Cardinal Velvet colorway at Hobby Lobby. This yarn is discontinued, likely due to a ton of quality issues with it, but I had no problems and a fun time working with it. For a knitter on a budget, it was a convenient and cheap substitution for the more expensive indie dyer colorways that I'm a huge fan of.

My Mum's favorite color is red, so that was an obvious decision, but she's also a Texas Tech alumna, so the Cardinal colorway being red with a bit of black in it was perfect for her. On top of that, it was an unusually cold winter that year, and every time she complained about needing to go buy a good warm hat her husband and I would come up with an excuse or redirection to keep her from spending money on something she was about to get as a gift. (Thanks Tommy for being in on it with me!)

I used some leftover yarn a while later to knit a Fidget bracelet for her as well.