Well, I went to the yarn market the other day and I got myself a new hat.





Look at the decreases:



Aren't they cool? I wish I knew how it was done . . .

I'd been thinking about this hat for a few weeks, and my general feeling is that I've thought about something for so long and the price is low enough, it'll probably be a good purchase. I didn't strictly need a hat; I got one as soon as I arrived because I find that I must, must MUST keep my ears warm or my life isn't worth living, and the hats I'd brought with me were not adequate to the task. (Well, that, and I knew I could get a really cool one here.) But I didn't like the hat I'd bought; in my thirty-below-zero desperation I took the first one with ear flaps, and I'm afraid that, in the words of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, it made me look like a penis. (Really. Scroll down to Item 11 on that list of hers.) Now, she was talking about herself, not me . . . but the image is hard to shake, you know? Especially when my winter coat is beige and the hat is gray.

Anyway, I wanted this hat in particular because of the color, and because it had long flaps that would would cover my ears and that could double as a scarf if need be.





It's wonderful. So simple. Such nice yarn.

Hats in general here are wonderful. They come in all sorts of colors and styles; Harbin, it turns out, is a very fashionable place, I've been told. (People have to tell me these things; I don't notice on my own.)







The most amazing thing to me is that the hats you see here were all handmade, by women who appear to be able to make a living cranking them out. The yarn market is really a large, warehouse-like space with many, many booths set up inside, and each booth is rented by a purveyor of yarn or knit goods or notions or all of the above. You can get just about anything you can imagine, and if it's not there or it's not in your size, you can get it made. Frequently women from several booths sit together and talk while working on their current creations - just like me and my knit buddies at home (except the people here get paid for what they make, whereas we pay a lot for the privilege of making something. Ah, development . . . )

And their sense of design is just amazing to me.





I kind of envy them, actually. Seems like it could be a rather pleasant life, coming up with designs for garments and then making them . . . I don't know how their lives are when they're away from work, but they seem to have a pretty good time while they're there. And they seem to make a living at this kind of thing here, whereas it's pretty darned difficult where I come from.

I'd thought that because knitting is not popular among the educated middle class here that everyone would be consigned to wearing boring machine-made, mass-produced garments, but nothing could be further from the truth . . .