One day in early April, I had just completed some afternoon errands and was quietly minding my own business when a large mirror in the entry of my home came off the wall.

It slid, almost noiselessly, and landed gently on a credenza that was underneath it.

Why the mirror didn’t break is a mystery to which I doubt I will ever have an answer, but what the displaced mirror revealed was that the wall had gotten wet, and that was why the mirror had been dislodged from its perch in the entry way.

What was revealed as a result of the mirror has lead to a series of professionals coming in and out of my home over the past three weeks in an effort to mitigate the damage sustained as the result of a leak.

While the leak in question was not related to the polybutylene piping that was in our house, we decided that while the house was already in need of repairs, we might as well attend to replacing the pipes, and since the plumbing contractor we hired was having what amounted to a half-off sale on tankless water heaters, we decided to do that as well.

During this plumbing event, one of the plumbers commented on a project I was working on and mentioned that his wife might like a hat. I asked what color, and he noticed a project I had done in Red Heart Super Saver grape fizz, and thought she might like that.

As my regular readers know, grape fizz is my current favorite color, and I was not about to pass up the opportunity to make a hat from it — the added bonus? He has two daughters that I could also make hats for in my quest to spread grape fizz crochet goodness all over the land.

Using Eileen Tepper’s Shell Edging Hat pattern as a starting point, I used an 8.0 mm hook and two strands of grape fizz for the first hat (the left-most hat in the photo below) and a 7.0 mm hook and two strands of grape fizz for the second (which is on the right in the photo below):

The biggest and most time consuming challenge of this project was to line up the changes in the yarn so that there would be no tweeding effect.

The two skeins I started with were from the same dyelot and made approximately one minute apart, but the pattern of the color changes in each skein went in the opposite direction from the other when pulled from the center of each skein.

I dealt with this by keeping one skein as it was, while I wound the other into a ball by pulling from the center. This allowed me to crochet with two strands and match up the color changes:

I love grape fizz and am trying to learn more about what can be accomplished with the shifting colors of variegated yarns, and while I don’t know exactly how I will use what I learned today, I am confident it will lead me somewhere interesting.

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