Tiny Needle Chunky Yarn

I made a great hat for my sister.  The design finishes the brim with a triangle piece that overlaps.  There is no real button hole-but it looks as if a button hole is there and you've just buttoned the brim.  I found a great button, had my yarn from the hat and sat down to finish the hat so it would arrive within a few weeks of her birthday (which for me is great-the last few years her present arrived 2-6 months later).  Going to the post office sucks and I just haven't conquered the online postage thing and pickup delivery with the USPS.

I encountered a problem.  The yarn is chunky.  It was quite difficult to get into the tapestry needle.  Even the huge blue things that I use for sewing with yarn.  The problem was the button holes.  Way too small for the blue needle to fit through.

So I pulled out the regular sewing needles.  I have packages of them.  So I just went through until I found one that fit through the button holes.  Check out the difference in size.

You can see the eye of the small needle if you look closely.  There was no way no way at all that the yarn was going to fit into that stupid tiny little hole.

As I was sitting there, a bit frustrated (Ok a lot frustrated and about to begin swearing like a pissed off sailor), I had an Epiphany -I could use tape to make the yarn fit into the tiny little eye of that sewing needle.  I pulled out the tape and tried out my brilliant idea (Yes I am sure others have come up with this idea and came up with it before I did-I am not claiming to be the mastermind behind the idea).

It's working!

It went through.  Sewing can now commence.

I made a matching cowl to compliment the hat.  Here it is a bit slouchy:

I was quite proud of myself for figuring out a way to make that button work.  Switching to thread would not have been a good idea.  Even with a ton of layers the button would likely fall off and she wouldn't sew it back on and the hat wouldn't get used.  Besides I had an idea in my head of how I wanted the finished project to look and it did not include thread.  So the next time you are stuck and about to swear-take a step back and think.  You'll have an epiphany too.