A while ago I was watching the Australian Open tennis and there was a match between Stan Wawrinka and Novak Djokovik. The courts were blue, and both men were wearing blue shirts, a symphony of blue. Being big on colour, I loved the look of the whole thing, but was especially captivated by Stan Wawrinka’s shirt. As you can see, it is deep blue at the bottom, transitions through a light blue in the middle, and into white at the top. Since that day, three of the hats I have made have been trying to capture the feeling of this colour shift.
ribbing folded under
These three views show my first attempt. I was just going on the impression I had in my memory of the shirt.
BTW, I will show you more of these sculptural hats I have been doing over the next few weeks. I have been on quite a knitting binge and have a lot of hats in the back of my car getting frozen in case moths may lurk in the house. Did I mention the freezer I bought to keep the hats in…lets just call the car the overflow catcher…freezer is getting full. |I guess I should have bought a bigger one.
This is attempt number 2. I googled Stan (aka my good buddy at this point) and found a picture of the shirt. I thought that while I was happy with the first hat as a hat, I wasn’t sure I captured the colour change. On this hat I got quite literal. I analyzed the colour changes in the shirt from the internet images and recreated them as best I could on the hat. It is hard to get a good impression of the hat because it looks very different from different angles, but it is not really worth looking at too much, because, in my opinion, it doesn’t work. Which brings me to the one I finished yesterday. I put the second hat on the hat form on my coffee table for a couple of days and thought of how I might capture the the colour changes but make it work as a hat. This is what I came up with:
sampler hat
This is the last hat in my ode to Stan Wawrinka series, but my first in the tribute to Barbara Walker series. I have decided to do a kind of Julie/Julia thing with Barbara G. Walkers first book, A Treasury of Knitting Patterns. It has over 500 patterns in it, so I decided to put a whole bunch in the first one. This hat is actually a stitch sampler. From the bottom it covers garter stitch, stockinette stitch (three variations-plain, twited and crossed), seed stitch, moss stitch, double seed stitch, dot stitch, sand stitch and knit 1 purl 1 ribbing. I thought the hat might be a good way to get a lot of the boring stitches over with in one fell swoop. And I am even happy with it as a hat…bonus points!
The rules of the challenge will be that any project must use the next pattern that appears in the book, the caveat being that I can use the next one in any one chapter or several chapters together. This will hopefully give me a modicum of artistic discretion.
gillianknits 