It felt like the right thing to do at the time.

As a lover of all things millinerial (ok, so that's not really a word, but it gets the point across), I often find myself admiring hats. Like kilts, single malts, motorcycles and straight razors, one really can't have too many hats.

At least that's my opinion. Not everyone in my house agrees with this philosophy. Which is why I keep a fair number of my hats in my office.

This love of owning and wearing hats means that I, of course, also like to make them. I'm still plotting my bamileke hat, but in the interim have made a number of other interesting hats to keep my head warm during the long dreary 9-month-long Seattle season of fawinpring. One such hat was my beloved peruvian hut hat, done in particularly garish colors of Lamb's Pride bulky wool.

The hat was knit and then felted. But just barely. And over time and exposure to the liquid sunshine so prevalent in this part of the world, it began to weep multicolored strands of yarn.

A good friend offered to use her new handy-dandy washing machine with its high-heat sanitize cycle to refelt the hat. We discussed the possibility that by subjecting the hat to the temperature of the wash, it might shrink just a bit. I handed off the hat, and went on my merry way.

And then she returned it to me, with more than a slight giggle.

The observant reader will note that something is different between these two photos. Like a miniature version of the debate between Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmology, the issue with the hat is one of perspective. There are two possible explanations: either my head has expanded tremendously in relation to the hat, or the hat is considerably smaller than when it was first felted.

I'm not sure which of these to events has occurred. But in the interim, I've found a new use for my Peruvian hut hat. It is now my Peruvian desk-mounted pistachio containment system or PD-MPCS for short.

~TSMK