Category Archives: Uncategorized

No frills allowed

Leave a reply
Heather in another unwearable hat

Heather in another unwearable hat

Heather seems scared… it has been more than a week since I have produced, in her opinion, a wearable hat…she came down this morning and saw this hat which I started last night,,,the third one with frills in a row.   She said “could you stop with the frills…they are awful” (don’t hold back honey, tell me what you really think). She also had a very valid point that this hat needs more peaches and less cream.   I guess we will call the frill experiment over and I will go onto something else for a while.

back view

back view

Another frilly one

4 Replies
picot edged frill and lots of colour

picot edged frill and lots of colour

from the back

from the back

I thought this one wasn’t turning out well at all, but I was finishing it at lunch with a friend who said it is her favourite of all the hats she’s seen of mine.  I guess there is something for everyone, and as they say, variety is the spice of life, etc.  Maybe it was the juxtaposition of the pretty picot frill with the Sons of Anarchy marathon I was watching while knitting it that caused me to think it wasn’t working out.  It doesn’t exactly scream biker mayhem, does it?

It would be good for using up lots of ends of balls, because there are only 8 rows total of each colour.  I just kept pulling out colours I thought would work, then repeated them each once.  Some of the colours would not work together if you only had a few, but with more colours, they blend together and its all good.

Frilly bottoms

Leave a reply
frilly bottom

frilly bottom

When I was doing the Remembrance Day hat, i did a scalloped bottom on the unfelted version.  I kind of liked how that worked out, so I decided I would explore the frilled edge for a few hats.  I made this one this weekend with Patons Classic Wool, black and Light Grey Marl.  I don’t think this hat works particularly well, but I think variations on the frilly bottom may an interesting avenue to pursue for a hat or two.

Men with hats…

Leave a reply
grey and white...always OK

grey and white…usually OK for men

I don’t know if it is just me, but I think that there are many more possibilities when designing hats for women.  Women can get away with any kind of colour or any amount of frilliness they want, although it still takes a certain personality to pull some more outlandish things off.  I can see most of the hats I make being worn by women, but a small subset can also be worn by men.  When I look at the hats around me (which of course I do constantly), I think most men tend to wear simple watch caps or ski hats.  Of my hats, more of the ones that men might wear are either off white, dark colours or shades of grey.

Unless you are my wonderful nephew Ben, for whom everything in life has always been possible.

everything is possible

anything and everything is possible

A pile of hats

Leave a reply
pile of hats

pile of hats

My family met at my sister Jane’s for the August long weekend.  Another sister, Penny, told me to bring my accumulated hats for a photo shoot, so I could start this blog.  We also co-opted my brother in law, Will, who has a nice camera with a portrait lens.  We threw all the hats down together and ended up with a big pile of hats to deal with, so things got busy.

Watchcaps with three ply handspun combined with plain commercial yarn

Watchcaps with three ply handspun combined with plain commercial yarn

We actually had a lot of fun.  Here is my son Jacob (centre top) sharing a laugh with (clockwise) his cousins, Jeremy and Jay and his uncles Will and Surya.  They are wearing a set of watch caps I did featuring handspun (the 3-ply blue/turquoise/black) and King Cole Antitickle DK.  I made these when I was flirting with the idea of selling this kind of hat.  The relationship floundered.

Rainbows, rainbows everywhere

Leave a reply
Ben in a rainbow

Ben in a rainbow

I love rainbows.  Off the top of my head I remember making stained glass rainbows, knitted rainbows, crocheted rainbows and felted rainbows.   Alan once called me a fibre snob…I only like working with natural fibres.  This is not actual snobbery, I just don’t like the feel of synthetics through my fingers. Unfortunately, it is sometimes easier to get a rainbow in synthetics than natural.  I think both of these hats are made with synthetics.  I made them a while ago and don’t remember out of what.

Jane in another..crocheted

Jane in another..crocheted

A couple of hats with handspun

Leave a reply
Hats made with handspun and commercial dk yarn

Hats made with handspun and commercial dk yarn

Meg and Sarah wearing hats featuring handspun

Meg and Sarah wearing hats featuring handspun

These are two of the hats I made when I was taking my Ontario Handspinners Certificate.  The one on the left was made with practice yarn for the ‘Snarl Yarn’ in the novelty yarn unit.  The other hat is made with a 4-ply from the fictitious line of yarns I made for my final project.  The plain pink yarn in this case was my then favourite yarn, King Cole antitickle DK.  My concept was to use a commercial yarn to showcase the handspun.  This serves a second purpose of stretching the handspun, which is, of course, pretty labour intensive.

Thrums

Leave a reply
Thrummed mitten

Thrummed mitten..a bit the worse for wear

I hate doing thrums…I can’t say why but it is the only thing (besides sewing up) that I really hate to do in knitting.  The hatred is completely irrational but completely real.  Which proves how much I love my husband because I have made him not just one, but two pairs of thrummed mittens.  For those that don’t know, he is a rampant cyclist and he commutes an hour each way on his bicycle on all but a handful of days a year.  Unfortunately for him, he also suffers from Reyes syndrome (poor circulation in the hands).  This used to lead to his fingertips cracking in the winters.  It was painful and also meant months where he legitimately could not do any dishes (from a purely selfish viewpoint). ANYWAY…his first pair of thrummed mittens solved the problem, at least until, sadly, he lost one of them in a downtown meeting, never to be seen again.

Alan in his 'thrummed' hat

Alan in his ‘thrummed’ hat

So, feeling sorry for him and not looking forward to a winter of solo dish washing, I made him a pair of thrummed mittens for Christmas.  I liked the way they looked so I made a fake thrummed hat to go with them.  No fleece inside this baby.

Mentors I’ve never met…Meg Swansen and Elizabeth Zimmerman

3 Replies

I am sure almost every serious knitter who read the title said to themselves ‘how original…they are everyone’s mentors’.  I love what this mother and daughter team has done for the knitting community.  I appreciate the intellectualism that they, together and individually, have fostered in the world of knitting.  My husband Alan bought me Meg Swansen’s book ‘A Gathering of Lace‘ for Christmas because I usually knit a couple of lace shawls a year, mostly from 1860’s patterns to put in the fall fair at work.  The reference pages and construction notes throughout this book are total gems.  Want to know how to knit backwards (entrelac anyone?)…its in there..pg. 164.  Want to know how many stitches you need to increase to keep your knitting flat?…its in there too..Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Pi Shawl Shaping..pg 38.  I used this math formula to keep the brim of my witch’s hat flat.  Worked like a charm…

lace hat from A Gathering of Lace.

lace hat from A Gathering of Lace.

This book contains the pattern for the only hat I have made from someone else’s pattern in several years. Here it is being blocked.  In case you are wondering, that is a 3″ high, 7″ diameter styrofoam cake form blocking the main part of the hat.  These would normally be used for fake wedding cakes and are available anywhere cake decorating supplies are sold. I taught cake decorating for many years and this was kicking around the house.  I thought it would work well for this purpose. This gives you a 22″ hat diameter, which is good for most women.  You could always cinch it in a bit with a decorative ribbon or a hatband if you want.

The hat in the picture and the witch’s hat both have real problems with floppy brims which I need to solve at some point.  But they both look great on a table….Maybe some old fashioned starch will do the trick.  I put some in this hat when I wet it for blocking, but maybe not enough,  The brim sagged almost immediately.

I thought I remembered, back in the 80’s, a show called ‘Knitting with Meg’ on PBS, but I can find no reference to it.  I used to organize my Saturday mornings around it.  I remember being totally psyched that there was actually a show about knitting on TV.  I hope it was her.

Cables in the Dark

Leave a reply
cables in the dark

cables in the dark

Sometimes, for me, knitting seems to be a biological imperative.  A while ago, we were driving to Toronto and it started to get dark.  The only knitting I had was this hat, and I really wanted to keep knitting.  I decided that I would keep going and if I screwed it up, I could rip it out when we got there and there was light.  I was amazed that I could actually tell when the cables were ready and that I could still manipulate the stitches on a dark highway in the middle of nowhere.  It turned out that when we got there, it was all OK and I only had to do the decreasing and the topper.  Granted, they are pretty simple cables.

I was again playing with how the colours come out from the variegated yarn.  This is another colourway in Patons Classic Wool.  In this hat, instead of separating out like they did in the hats in the  Playing with Variegated Yarn post, they overlap in swirls  According to my notes, I cast on 10 fewer stitches for this hat (100 stitches) than the ones where the colours separated.

less stitches (too few) makes wider swirls of colour

less stitches (too few) makes wider swirls of colour

I tried this other hat with yet fewer stitches (96..so more overlap), but it is getting small for an adult.  You can see it was too small for the bowl we had used to display all the other hats.  It would be fine for kids though. You really are limited in how many stitches a) will work for your hat and b) will give you the effect you want.

I was trying to branch out a bit on the topper, so I used an idea which I modified from (I think) Knitting on the Edge, but I can’t find my copy to double check. It makes spirals.  I started the topper when I had decreased to 21 stitches. I started with the first three live stitches, did a slip 1, k2tog, psso, then cast on another 11.  I then knit all 12 back to the base and then, on the next row out,  I did a k1, p1, k1 in each stitch.  Finally, I cast off as I returned back to the base.  I went down to 1 stitch at the base, picked up two more live stitches did the s1, k2tog, psso and cast on another 11, etc.  I kept doing this, picking up stitches until I ran out of live stitches (10 swirls). The whole thing was corralled to make it hang together in a similar manner to the i-cord rose. I find you may have to play with the arms so the spirals will straighten up and fly right…oops I mean curl up and lie right.