This weekend  a number of things (including Valentine’s Day) had a claim to my time, so I did not get done as much crochet as I would have liked, but when I did finally get to my beloved craft, I found myself in a quandary about the 25th round of the Peter Max alpine hat I have been working on.

When I set it aside late Thursday afternoon, it looked like this:

which — the more I looked at it — struck me as serviceable rather than “just right.”

So today, when I had a moment that was free of other obligations, I took my hook and my yarn stash, and I got to work redoing the 25th round, hoping that when all was said and done, I would find something new that I liked better.

To speed the process, I decided to crochet 41 of the 82 stitches called for in one color, and then crochet the remaining stitches in a second color. This would allow me to easily compare one with another and choose a favorite.

For the first forty-one stitches I used Craft Smart Value Yarn sangria colorway:

from there, I switched to the long ago discontinued Red Heart Classic colorway the name of which eludes me:

Between those two, the clear winner for me and my youngest son whom I had called upon for one of my dreaded “color consults,” was the sangria, and while I felt the sangria was an improvement over the gold, I wasn’t convinced that it was the best my stash had to offer, so I dove into the bag that houses my partial skeins of variegated yarns and came up with another Red Heart option the label for which was lost long ago:

Something about this last option, the second B, was, if not “just right,” very close to “just right,” so I decided that I would go forward with this last option frogging both the sangria and the mystery colorway, and then reworking the entirety of round 25 in the second B “mystery” colorway.

I love being able to crochet with all of the colors of the rainbow with a few extras thrown in, but sometimes it is not the fastest work.