THREE TAMS--TAM A

I had been working on a vest made with Red Heart's "Gemstone", but discovered that my second (and third) skeins had a very different colorway than my first had--same color name, different dye lots. The one I had used for the vest back had navy blue, and darker colors than the other skeins, which had no navy at all. You can kind of see the difference in this picture:


So, I had to stop work on it until I could find more yarn closer to my original (which I did find on Friday at Michaels). Anyhow, I wanted to knit something small, and remembered the tams in the new Winter issue of Knitty, which fortuitously used small amounts of ombre-type yarns. I have several orphan multicolored yarns in small amounts. I started one with size one needles for the ribbing (I have to go down 2-3 sizes to get guage) and a grey-white-green-rust kind of yarn with an off white; the ribbing seemed too tight and the white in the ombre got lost in the white of the background. I frogged it and started another using size 2 for the ribbing and size 3 for the main part and found a small ball of this multi


with an ecru-ish main color. The colors look great together:


It took about a week of obsessive knitting, but I finished it Sunday.
The hat from the side, stretched:


The top of the hat:


Since it is acrylic, not wool, I can't really block it. Here's how it looks on me as a tam:




If I pull it down like a cap, it goes down to my nose! Though I could fold the ribbing up.