Disclaimer: Yeah, it's totally anticlimactic.
Most of y'all reading this probably know that I'm a fan of all things math and science. I have no clue what most of it means, but I like it nevertheless. This is why I have patterns for a Klein bottle hat, a Moebius scarf, and a Doctor Who scarf in this section. It follows that I'd want other similiarly geeky patterns.
I got the idea for this hat while watching The Universe online. I'd missed viewing it on TV at the regular time due to working some show at the Erwin Center, so I caught it on the Internet later. The website featured a picture of a galaxy (I don't know whether it were the Milky Way), and I decided I'd like a knitting pattern reminiscent of the night sky. Yarn will never capture the glory of the stars, alas, but I could at least create a shitty homage. I didn't want to get carried away since overly complex patterns tend not to look good, so I decided to make a simple design on a hat or something. I Googled astronomical symbols at first, but I decided that what I found wouldn't look good, and I reverted to my original plan of knitting something with navy and white yarn. Then I remembered that Lion Brand makes a couple of metallic white yarns in Wool Ease, which up till now has always been a source of extreme aggravation since they don't make Wool Ease in plain white (WTF?). So, under the influence of stagehand flu, I rushed to Michael's before they closed one night and bought a skein of aforementioned white and metallic yarn. I could now knit the stars.
I did a Google Image search for the Milky Way and found several photos. I ignored the pretty pictures and instead looked at a basic diagram of the galaxy that consisted entirely of four crude counterclockwise spirals. That seemed easy enough to chart.
I was wrong.
I spent a couple of hours with graph paper and map pencils trying to figure out how to get the spirals to work before, duh, I figured out that all I had to do was refer to any given spiral cap for assistance—including, good LORD, the pattern I'd already designed for Ralf's spiral striped stocking cap. It was essentially the same thing I'd done with Ralf's hat, only much less intense. So I charted and recharted trying to decide how wide I wanted the spirals to be and how to work the decreases, and then of course work began with epic tangles of yarn.