Tag Archives: knitted hat

A pile of hats

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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.

Lest we Forget

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Remembtance Day hat, felted version

Remembtance Day hat, felted version

I had the idea for this Remembrance Day hat a couple of weeks ago.  it was supposed to be a felted version of a twenties cloche with a crocheted poppy.  I think I have discovered on Halloween and today why knitted felting was a short lived fad.  Firstly a felted hat has at least 50% more stitches in it than a regular hat because of the shrinkage.  Secondly, the washing machine turns into a real crapshoot.

Remembrance Day hat, unfelted version

Remembrance Day hat, unfelted version

unfelted version, top view

unfelted version, top view

I spent the last couple of days off and on knitting the felted hat.  I mapped it out on paper and used the (newly recovered) tension square that I had made and lost for the witches hat on Halloween to calculate the stitches. I knitted and knitted, and then put it in the washer and dryer.  I got a pattern for the crocheted poppy from Treasures in Needlework by Mrs Warren and Mrs Pullan, 1870, and threw it in the laundry with the hat.  This morning I got them out and found what I thought was a shapless, unusable mess.

I then set about spending today knitting the second (unfelted) hat and making a scaled down crocheted poppy from my head.  Now I am not sure which one is better.

Rainbows, rainbows everywhere

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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

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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

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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.

A Not Unpleasant Hat…

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Nicky in a not unpleasant hat

Nicky in a not unpleasant hat

a not unpleasant top view

a not unpleasant top view

As I was leaving the Ottawa Knitters Guild meeting one night, someone was knitting with the fuchsia yarn in this hat.  I commented that I thought it was nice.  She said something like ‘here take it…I don’t like it and I was going to throw it out’.  I came home and started making this hat.  The next day my oldest sister, Jane, came to visit.  She watched the hat grow and when it was finished, she said (in a surprised voice)…’that’s actually not an unpleasant hat’….high praise, indeed..be still my heart!

Cables in the Dark

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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.

Variations on a theme…Aran knit hat

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Heather read my blog the other day and said that I was probably giving the impression that most of my hats are weird and made out of novelty yarn.  That is why I finished the top down hat for yesterday and I have decided to show a series of Aran hats today.  I worked on these back when I had aspirations to writing a hat design book,  The challenge I gave myself in this exercise was to make up a basic Aran pattern for a hat, then change the appearance of the hat by making different brims and tops.  These are what I came up with, 6 worsted weight hats and one hatband out of Patons Classic Wool, and a stripped down chunky wool version (can’t remember what it was)–okay, I admit, some of them may be weird.

Top down hat

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top down hat

top down hat

top down hat...detail

top down hat…detail

I made just the top of this hat a couple of weeks ago so I could demonstrate the i-cord rose that I like to use (see Technique: I-cord rose (aka go big or go home)).  I only had the crown of the hat, so I picked up from the original cast on and built the hat downwards from there.  Unfortunately, I had only a few feet of yarn left of the variegated I had made the rose with…not even enough for one row more so I couldn’t reintroduce it further down for balance.  I think it is ok anyway.

In order to keep things consistent, I cast everything off and picked up all the stitches again twice further down the hat, once at each place I changed patterns.  I used Patons Classic Wool, yet again.  I always use a 4 1/2 mm needle with this yarn,  For the cast off, I wanted it loose to match the tension on the cast on edge near the crown, so I went up to a 7 mm just for the middle cast off.  Looking at this line,  I thought it could be even looser, so for the final cast off, closest to the ribbing, I used an 8 mm needle. I think I will go with 8 mm in future if I do this again.

Teletubby Puke

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I used to have a clipping on my fridge with a list of encouraging phrases you could use to praise your children.  Good job, that’s great, fantastic, etc.  I kept it there so I didn’t sound too repetitive when I was expressing myself to my children, Jacob and Heather.

Teletubby puke colours

Teletubby puke colours

Heather came home from school when I had a few inches done on the first of these hats.  I thought it was going well so I asked her what she thought. “It looks like teletubby puke” was the answer.  I thought to myself yo, bitch, what do you know? (I was in the middle of a Breaking Bad marathon on Netflix) …those colours are nothing like the teletubby colours…I did not say it…that would have been discouraging to my offspring… and who knows, maybe colours change in the stomachs of teletubbies?

Teletubby puke

Heather wearing Teletubby puke

I have come to realize that our children hopefully thrive on the encouragement we give them in their endeavours, but the mother of a teenage girl must carry on despite the discouragement. Heather does wear Teletubby Puke quite a lot and is proud of the name she gave it.  She is still my best critic and her (sometimes) derisive comments often help me think of new paths to take.

Three more because I liked the colours...

Three more because I liked the colours…