Update Aug. 18/14: The hat pattern is now available in Interweave Knits Holiday Gifts 2014. I’ll be releasing matching scarf and mitten patterns independently this fall. The sample hat took 51g of yarn

Testing a yarn for Michelle at Widdershin Woolworks: worsted weight, 100% Targhee. Going to start with a hat, and then try different needle sizes. First impressions: This feels like a good multi-purpose yarn. It’s very springy, and it’s wooly without feeling scratchy. The colours are in short repeats, and they look very harmonious in the skein. Alas, we’re in the middle of some endless rain, so I wasn’t able to get a photo of the skein before knitting.

Final impressions: I like this yarn. I like it a lot. Springy, wooly, and though I haven’t done the friction test yet, it feels like it will wear well. It softens beautifully after a wash, making a squishy, bouncy, cohesive fabric that I think is soft enough for next to skin wear. This yarn looks like it would work well in a range of gauges and hold its shape. I don’t work with a lot of variegated yarns, but I really like how this one is dyed -- the colours work well together, and the hat had no pooling at all. When I modeled the hat for himself, his comment was, “Oh, I like that a lot. It would go with anything.” There was no pooling in the hat that I could see. There was a bit in the swatch, but nobody’s going to make something swatch-sized, so that’s probably not a fair test of the colour distribution. I changed my mind several times about the hat, and the yarn took frogging like a champ. You’d want to keep the pattern simple -- the yarn looks great in plain stockinette or a simple rib -- to show off the colours without things getting too busy.

Swatched in 3 needle sizes:
4mm/US 6: pre-wash: 18 sts=4”
4.5mm/US7: pre-wash: 19 sts = 4” (WTF? I have no idea how that happened, but I re-counted several times, so that’s what happened.)
5mm/US8: pre-wash: just over 17 sts = 4”