Everything was going so well, until I blocked it…

I don’t know if you saw the full moon earlier a couple of weeks ago, but it was a rare Super Blue Moon. Which doesn’t mean it was blue at all, but it was absolutely spectacular.

In case you don’t know, the moon is “super” when it’s closest to the earth — the perigee of its orbit — and a “blue” moon means its full for the second time in a calendar month. And while a supermoon isn’t all that rare, a blue moon occurs in only 3% of full moons, and the next super blue moon won’t be for another 14 years.

Photo by Ganapathy Kumar

I went out for a late night walk to see it, climbing to the top of our steep hill to catch the view as it began to rise.

The skies over Pittsburgh were covered in hazy clouds that hung like a veil over the moon, catching and reflecting its light so that it appeared even larger than it was: a super super blue moon. It was breathtaking.

I’ve just recently finished knitting a new hat that I’ve designed in a recent SpaceMonster Club colourway, a layered midnight blue called Darkening. And I was utterly delighted with the way it turned out! It’s fun and quirky, and turned out exactly as I hoped, so I began to write up the pattern.

And after I’d notate the basics of what I’d done, I did something I really shouldn’t have: I wet blocked the hat, dunking it completely in a bowl of water.

I shouldn’t have done that because the yarn is Capella, our beautiful single-ply worsted that so smooshy… but along with that smoosh comes a tendency to bloom a lot when it’s wetted out. It absolutely loves being misted into shape, not dunked.

But I did indeed dunk it, and suddenly my hat went from being the regular moon to a super super moon.

Which was also… blue. Maybe it was fated to happen.

As it dried, I managed to coax the hat back to a more reasonable size. It’s still remarkably slouchy, but it’s no longer ridiculous. And I’ve cast on a second one, this time in Darkening’s sister SpaceMonster colourway, Drifting, which I’ll most definitely mist-block.

When at last I release the hat pattern as a new SpaceCadet yarn knitting design, it will come in two versions, each slightly different. I have a pattern name already chosen — one that’s just as fun and quirky as the hat itself — which I was going to use with the suffixes I and II (like a movie and its sequel) to distinguish the two versions.

But now I’m wondering… maybe one of them should really be called Super Super Blue Moon…? It kinda feels right!