Jan 2, 2013:
I really liked the way this hat turned out, but I realized I’d never wear it, and I needed the yarn for another project I ran short on. So I frogged it. Practicality wins.
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I love this yarn with a passion and I was dying to use it but just didn’t have time for a big project. Then I needed to regroup on this hat for a Nerd Wars challengs (see details below) and I picked up one ball of this just to see what happened.
Why is every yarn I fall in love with discontinued?

Scientific: Transit of Venus
To celebrate this very rare astronomical phenomenon, your challenge this month is to use your crochet, knitting, spinning and weaving skills to represent planets and/or their movements through the solar system.

Theotherjenny
Team ’Punks
Crochet
The Eclipse Hat
The idea of the universe as a machine with the planets merely cogs and gears turning within it is very steampunkian (particularly if the planets have water and are very close to the sun), and this Eclipse Hat celebrates that. The warm, golden brown crown represents the sun, shading into the blue of space, across which the cogs and gears (planets and moons) of the solar system continually turn. And because it’s a hat, there’s also an explosion of net and metal flowers to represent the Big Bang that started everything. The finishing touch: If you look at the hat from the top, it’s the Venus transit.

June 17:
The hat form is done and looks sloppy, but I think that’s what a Goldie hat would look like. A lot will depend on the finishing, too, but from now on I’m using a vintage hat pattern instead of making it up as I go.
I do kind of like how dorky this is, though. Very Goldie.

June 19:
I must have been on drugs, that hat is a disaster. Starting over with two vintage patterns.

Later on June 19:
Vintage patterns not really a help. Faking it again now as follows:
Start with 8 sc and increase by 8 every row.
Added a plain row sc after every increase row after row 5 to prevent buckling until row 9 (72 stitches) because after that it buckled the other way if I put in a plain row. Added one more row, 14 (112 stitches).
Add a plain row over a copper wire.
Continue to add unwired rows until crown is as deep as you want. This one is 3”.

I had to splice the second ball in the middle of the crown so I used spit splicing for the first time:
http://morcatknits.typepad.com/spitsplicing/2005/03/or_ho...
Wowza does that work well. Can’t see the join at all.

When the crown is as deep as you want, do a row of sc using only the front loop of the previous row, increasing every fifteenth stitch (put the fifteenth stitch in the same sc as the fourteenth) and then keep crocheting and increasing (my increases were all over the place) until the brim is as deep as you want it to be. Then do one more row of sc over a wire around the rim and then another row of sc on top of the previous row so you have a doubled edge.