random hats

Hats can be great for needlework experiments. You only cast on about half a sweater's worth of stitches, play around with stitches and colours, bring the top to some sort of logical conclusion, and there it is — a hat. They're also great for stash-busting, because you only need to make one of them, and so long as they are in reasonably wearable colours, no-one is too concerned if they don't matchy-match one's coat and gloves perfectly.

Okay, that's true for Canada. Perhaps in more temperate climates people are pickier. Here the prevailing attitude is, "It's warm, it's clean, it fits, it doesn't look too awful and I gotta go out. Done." It's not unusual to see someone otherwise dressed in rather nice business attire sporting a toque in the colours and logo of their kid's hockey team.

The hat at the top of this post is the infamous Shedir pattern Knitty published a few years ago, and which is now part of their free download supporting breast cancer awareness. Shedir was designed as a chemo cap, but it's also a very stretchy design, so it will fit on the head of someone with hair.

I've made Shedir before; an effort that was originally made for me but wound up going to my friend Cathy. My face is too square/round to wear toque-style hats successfully, whereas hers is thinner and looks great in them.

It was fun working through the pattern again. Shedir is an absolute joy to knit, especially if you enjoy Bavarian/"baby" cables. The instructions are flawless and the finishing at the top transforms the mini braided cables of the sides into a nice flat star shape.

I used a stashed ball of Cascade 220 100% superwash wool, but if you are making it as a chemo cap, use the recommended Rowan Calmer. It's smooth, very soft, and super stretchy. It will feel good on a bare scalp not used to being bare, and if they like, the recipient can keep using it as a hat after their hair grows back.

The brown hat with the star colourwork is the Basic Hat pattern from Ravelry, plus a colour chart from the Norwegian Star earflap hat. Both are free patterns, and both happen to have the same stitch multiple, so they go well together (the Basic Hat author recommended the earflap chart). The version I made uses up some more yarn from the nieces' kitties playset. A lot of things are coming back to the kitties playset right now.

The last hat to show, but actually the first I made of these three, is the Windschief-ish hat I made from the same brown yarn as the Basic Hat. This is a beanie with a twisted-rib border, where a quarter of the stitches stay in twisted rib while the rest of the hat switches to stockinette. The ribbed section biases to one side by decreasing before and increasing after the section, until it's time to decrease for the crown. At that point, you decrease before and after the ribbed section, plus at two other equidistant points. Because there are only four decrease points instead of the traditional eight or twelve, you have to decrease every round instead of the usual every other. That means that the "camera iris" effect at the top of the hat shifts twice as fast, and the ever-narrowing ribbed portion swirls around the crown in a pleasing spiral effect.

At least, that's how this hat went. The pattern is for sale, for $6 USD. That's nearly $8 Canadian at the time of this writing, and for a hat I can guess so much about just by looking at photos... I just can't. There's instructions for a cowl included, but the cowl just seems to be the same as the hat, except you never do the crown shaping, and you put a twisted-rib border at the top as well as the bottom. The cowl "fits closely", which tells me it's the same circumference as the hat. I'm actually planning on making another hat and a cowl to match it, just because the pattern seems show off to take variegated yarns well, and I have several hundred grams of variegated to get out of stash.

In the meantime, I found... most of another skein of brown buried in a basket of red and blue yarns I had set aside for the giant stripey blanket. It's actually visible just left of centre in the first photo of that link. I'll have to figure out what to do with it, but I suspect it will be turned into another hat.

poké-woolies

Niece the Elder's birthday is on New Year's Eve, which gives you an idea of how far behind on blogging I am right now.

Ahem. Let's start again.

Niece the Elder's birthday is on New Year's Eve. Besides dooming her to a life of birthdays where there's always a party, it means that she tends to get gifts a little late from me. It's hard to come up with distinctive Yule and birthday gifts when the birthday happens only a week later.

Niece the Younger, meanwhile, is not quite old enough to see her sister get a gift without her getting the same. Her birthday is at the end of March, so I told them I would get them both little gifts for each one's birthday, so they both got things both times.

Right now they are both into all things Pokémon, especially the trading cards. My mum found them some commercially-made Poké knits, and suggested I make them hats and matching mittens.

There are a lot of patterns on-line for Pokémon, of varying degrees of aesthetic success. My hat and mitts are based on this free pattern, though I followed the advice of other people and crocheted the circle motif instead of duplicate stitching it. The other mod I made was to only cast on 80 sts for the hat, instead of the recommended 100 — a lot of posters commented 100 sts was too big for their kids. I got 80 sts by remembering that Elizabeth Zimmermann calculated a hat to be the right size if it were half the circumference of a sweater, and looking up how many stitches at the same gauge I would need to knit the nieces sweaters.

The mittens are the same basic two-needle pattern from a free Paton's leaflet I've been making since I was twelve years old. It's so basic, in fact, that it's very easy to adapt to specific colour patterns, as done here.

Here's Niece the Younger modelling a hat while her big sister attends hockey practice:

I gave them a booster pack of trading cards to go with the knits, plus some lenticular bookmarks with wildlife scenes on them. I think the cards and especially the bookmarks were a bigger hit, but they liked the knits. Niece the Younger pointed out it meant she would always have three Pokéballs on her in case she found some monsters to catch.

The best part (for me) is that the black, silver, and white yarn were already in stash because of the kitties I made them, so I only had to buy the red. So I managed to work some stash-busting in too.

spirals, stretch, physics

Niece the Elder requested a thin, warm hat to wear under her hockey helmet, so I headed to the internet and found this free Swirl Hat pattern by Mandie Harrington.

This is one of those great free patterns one finds sometimes. The directions are written for a wide range of sizes, from preemie to adult. The writing-up is very clear, and includes colour coding so you can easily keep track of the numbers for the size you are making. I'm not surprised at all that as of this blog post the pattern is available in eight different languages. In itself it's a great example of the internet glomming onto a truly cool thing someone's done and running with it.

The spiral rib design means that the fabric will stretch comfortably to fit lots of different heads. When I was making it I kept calling it the "Jiffy Pop" hat — the swirl is similar to the aluminum foil top of the Jiffy Pop pan before the popcorn puffs it out. I like that it was written for fingering weight yarn instead of the usual worsted or chunky — not everyone wants or needs a thick hat for all winter occasions! The nieces do play a lot outside during the winter, but they also spend a lot of time sitting in cars in full winter gear. It makes sense for them to have thinner hats for when they might be cold but not necessarily braving the elements.

This hat is a great example of a project that is fun to knit up, but also very quick. The regular rib at the lower border bothered me more than usual. Nothing to do with the pattern — I just wasn't into it. The first few rounds of the spiral rib were confusing, but once I learned how to read the fabric it was very easy to do. The rhythm's a little different from the sorts of texture and lace I'm used to. One thing to watch out for: the spiral lace means that the start of round is not obvious after the work gains some height. As always, I'm reluctant to use stitch markers, so I noted where the yarn tail from the cast-on was, and traced that rib up to where I was working to determine where I was in the actual round. I was using dpns instead of a circular needle anyhow, so I had a backup indicator.

The top of the hat is completed via a stitch pattern modification which decreases the stitches over several rounds, bringing the hat's swirl to a graceful close with a flat, non-lumpy finish.

The bubblegum pink sock yarn was originally bought as embroidery yarn for the Hello Kitty-style boot cuffs I made Niece the Elder back in 2012. That only took a miniscule amount, so most of the skein has been sitting in my stash ever since, making me wonder what on earth I was going to make with bubblegum pink sock yarn. Turns out the remainder of the 100g ball will make at least two, possibly three hats. The nieces are prone to lose hats, so I'm going to keep making bubblegum pink ones until I run out of yarn.