With the cold front that seems to be arriving everywhere at once, I can’t help but feel that I have finished my crochet ear warmer project just in time, and while it won’t make the cold weather go away or prevent snow from falling or rain from freezing, it does give me a sense of having been able to do something — however small — to alleviate the weather.

Not only did the project work up quickly — here is the front:

and here is the back:

but I was also delighted to have achieved (at least in my estimation) one of crochet’s holy grails — an invisible (or at least practically invisible) seam:

Because the yarn changes color, it isn’t totally impossible to find the seam as it is where the red and purple colors of the yarn abut, but to my mind it is about as close to invisible as is humanly possible.

Buoyed by the success of my most recent design, after I had woven in the ends on the crochet ear warmer, I kept my hook out and got started on a pair of slip stitch fingerless gloves to coordinate with the ear warmer.

My progress was a big slow. A technique I had employed for turns on the ear warmer turned out to be a design no-no for the future fingerless gloves, so the day’s crochet effort did involve frogging, but eventually, I found a turning technique that worked for the gloves, and having chosen the length of the initial chain because it is a prime number (thirty-one for those who care about such things), I was both delighted and surprised to find that it seemed to have gotten me very close to the exact length I wanted:

I know that my winter crochet gear will not protect me from all of the weather that is coming in the next few days, or from the aftermath, but it will give me some added protection from the cold, and there is something exhilarating in being able to make it oneself.