One aspect of winter about which I have mixed feelings is the cold.

I like that it kills fleas and leaves my dog less itchy and more comfortable, but I don’t like the fact that for what seems like six months of the year, it seems to penetrate my bones and leaves me feeling chilled most of the time.

Several year ago I bought three skeins of a worsted weight felted roving dyed in several of my favorite colors and thought that if I crocheted a hat and a pair of fingerless gloves, and yardage permitting, an ascot, I might have found the perfect antidote to winter.

But instead of crocheting myself relief from the cold, the three skeins of yarn sat in a cubby in my crochet empire doing no one any good — least of all me.

So this past week, in an effort to put this long abandoned yarn to use, I pored over crochet ear warmer and headband patterns, and while there are hundreds of wonderful options from which to choose, I didn’t find any that both met my personal criteria and suited the yarn.

So with hook in hand and a skein of yarn wound into a ball, I got to work on a back loop only slip stitch head band.

My initial effort was a bit longer than I wanted it to be, but when I shortened it by three stitches, I got the length (which will end up as the width of the ear warmer) that I was looking for:

and I also loved the look of the back loop only slip stitch:

Encouraged that the swatch was turning out so well, I continued crocheting moving from predominantly red and purple to orange and purple then to yellow and purple to green and a bright orchid which were then supplanted by a vivid pink and blue:

I still have a couple of more inches to crochet before I put the right sides together of this future ear warmer together and join them with a slip stitch, but I am well on my way to transforming this yarn from cubby filler to a useful object from which I will no doubt get a lot of use and joy.