Yep, just a brown hat. But this is a special brown hat, because it's knitted from the brown yarn I spun on my hand spindle a some days ago (spinning this particular fiber was itself a minor miracle), plus some red yarn I spun last year. This is a significant triumph for me, you understand, and it has very little to do with the the intrinsic beauty or artful complexity of the hat itself (really, it's just an ordinary brown hat).
My problem: I spin all this lovely yarn and I don't know what to do with it, so I have a wonderful, colorful stash of skeins and small balls of handspun yarn from my dyeing experiments. There's never enough to do anything big (like a sweater) even if I wanted to, which I don't, because this is Texas and because the family members I might want to knit sweaters for either 1) knit for themselves, 2) grow too fast, or 3) don't like to hand-wash wool sweaters (and who can blame them?).
But I am resolved to do more spinning and find ways to use my handspun this year. I regard this brown hat as a down payment on this resolution. From that point of view, this is not just any brown hat. It is a hat rich in significance. It is a hat heavy with symbolism. I am not giving it away. I will wear it indoors and out, even when the air conditioner is running, to remind me of what I aim to do. Well, maybe.
Reading Note, from At Knit's End (my favorite book on knitting) by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee:
When I took up spinning, my husband worried that it was just going to devolve into another addition. To make him feel a little better I pointed out how much money I was going to save spinsning my own yarn. Then I bought a spinning wheel, carders, fleece, and dye.
I will remember that timing is everything, and I might have wanted to make my point sometime after I had spent all that money getting set up and spinning a $500 skein of lumpy yarn.