Dice Roll Cap: Truly Random Stripes

I was going through my stash on New Year's Eve and decided there were way too many scraps. I keep a small basket with odds and ends in it for adding stripes to things, provisional cast ons, etc., but didn't think it would necessarily work nicely into an even and predictable pattern.

While reading through The Opinionated Knitter I found a section where Meg Swansen talks about her mother creating tams from random colors. Essentially, EZ would make a pile of light colored yarn and a pile of dark colored yarn and randomly pick from each pile and knit one stripe of each yarn to create a tam. Meg describes her mother as being very dedicated to being truly random when closing her eyes and selecting the next yarn to be knitted.

I decided I'm not good at closing my eyes and randomly selecting a yarn. I find myself cheating in the back of my mind. To avoid this, I decided to make my project into a game.

I selected six yarns from my stash and assigned each one a number. I even made a chart to keep myself honest. I then rolled a die and wrote the numbers down. Whatever number was chosen was the yarn to be knitted. If the number rolled more than once, then I knitted that number again. One number (number 2) rolled once very early, but then didn't roll again until 20 rolls later. Number three (red) kept rolling over and over and has become a very vibrant stripe in the hat.

I chose to do a simple cap, but to add a little bit of excitement to it. Casting on 100 stitches and knitting three inches of K1P1 ribbing, when I got to the stockinette portion of the cap, I added a slipped stitch every ten stitches. This has added regular ridges on my otherwise very random cap. I haven't QUITE decided how I'm going to do the decreases, but I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Oh! I really don't know who I'm going to give this hat to. I'm certainly not going to wear it. The one person who has seen it so far thinks it's "neat," but I'm not sure that means it's attractive.