Tag Archives: knitting

A Canadian Christmas hat, eh Barbara

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I have been giving the red and white yarns a run for their money this past couple of weeks. I decided after making the rude/not rude hat for Jake last week that I would make a Canadian Christmas hat. This just says Merry Christmas in our two official languages. I decided not to bother with any negative sayings on this one as I am feeling quite good about Christmas right about now. I have been making a family set of Santa hats which I will show when our little family is finally together next week. Jake is finishing his exams and coming home on Wednesday.
Last year we got in heck from Heather because we had no Christmas tree. This year we made sure we had one when she came home last week. This week, I suggested we should decorate it because it was pretty minimal i.e. just a tree in a stand. She put an angel on top and declared it sufficiently decorated. Fine by me. It smells nice anyway. If I get inspired I may make some decoration sized hats this coming week, but only if I get inspired…
This hat uses two Barbara Walker stitches, Seeded Chevron from page 27 for the reversible red crown and Banded Crescent Pattern, pg 110 for the inside brim.

The bottom rolls a bit, Barbara

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gillianknits.comBut you can make it behave as you put it on your head, so it is not bad.  I am pleased with the graphic look of the hat.  I realize it is my usual shape.  I have been thinking a lot about why that is, and I have come up with two reasons.   Number one, hats need to sit on a head and stay there, so a functional hat has to conform to certain restrictions.  I believe absolutely in function over form, and I always have as a craftsperson.  We used to talk about this perennial debate in pottery school and I was always four square for function.gillianknits.com

The second reason is that I am fascinated by the process of getting rid of the stitches.   I mentioned a long time ago I learned much of what I know about knitting hats from the hat book (Hats On! by Charlene Schurch I worked my way through a decade or so ago  Lots of friends and family own hats designed by her, because I made way too many of them to keep for my small family.  Alan still wears one of them every day of the winter, and has never replaced it by one of my design.  One line in the book bothered me and it was when she was trying to get rid of a heavily patterned set of stitches and she got rid of them all in a couple of rows by doing k2tog so she didn’t loose the pattern effect, then put a pompom on top. I felt at the time this was a cop out.   As I knit a pattern, I am constantly trying to figure out how to get rid of the stitches in a (hopefully) elegant manner.  Iff that is not possible, then I put a decorative element on the top.  I find I am putting decorative elements on top less and less.  Usually if I  put them on now it is because of other design considerations, like the fact that squiggly bits on the top are fun to make and look at, rather than hiding something.

The stitch is Clouds and Mountains, pg 68.  I did 15 repeats of the 8 stitch pattern, which covers 8 rows. I did a k2tog through back loops, k2 ,k2tog on the dark parts every 5th repeats, did one row plain following the pattern then k2togtbl, k2tog above the previous repeats.  I did this twice more so I had got rid of the entire repeat.  I did this 5 times on top of each other until I had used up all the stitches.

Rude inside

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My son Jacob’s girlfriend Sarah asked me a while ago to make her a hat that has rude expressions on it.  She turns 19 today so HAPPY BIRTHDAY to her!  Don’t scroll down if swear words offend you….actually I didn’t show the really rudest side.

I decided that it probably wasn’t hugely useful to have a hat that was just plain rude.  What happens if you are going different places over the day and not all of them are places you would feel comfortable wearing such a thing?  For this reason, I have made the hat completely reversible a la the reversible Christmas hat which had different sentiments for different moods.

I did not include the ruder side which says F#$@ IT (with no euphemistic symbols)…

Kicking off Scout/Guide week

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Well, it is Scout/Guide week, at least in Canada, this week (February 16-23, 2014), so it is time to show the Scout hats.  A while ago I posted a couple of flag hats, one of them a Union Jack, the other the Quebec fleur-de-lis.  When I made those, I had planned to do more including a Maple Leaf and probably a Stars and Stripes, but these are the hats that got in the way of that.  Heather saw the Quebec fleur-de-lis and said “too bad you didn’t do it in purple for the Scouts”.  She has been very active in her Scout troop for several years.  She has been to England and on a service trip in Peru with them, as well as on countless hikes and camping trips.  Needless to say, by the time I had made these two hats, I was off on another tangent and I never got back to flags.

I made the Union Jack flag during the London Olympics.  For those of you that have been following me for a while, you have probably noticed that I am a slave to popular cultural events around me when it comes to design ideas.  Whenever a holiday or major sporting event starts impinging on the zeitgeist, I get taken in and go along for the ride.

Now that I am doing the blog, I am often swept into a frenzy of “having” to finish the hat I have thought of because it will only be relevant for the next 24 hours or so…case in point I thought of and cast on the Valentine hat on Thursday, finished it on Friday (Valentine’s day) afternoon.  As I was casting off the Valentine’s Day hat, the broken heart hat popped into my head….it would only work the next day… I suck in this way.  My friend Ruth said I should pretend I work for a magazine so I can live a few months ahead and do them at my leisure, but I am pretty sure I wouldn’t bother.

Happy Valentines Day

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This is actually the third iteration of this hat.  It is a version of the skull hat that I started the blog with back before Halloween.  After I made the skull hat, Heather commissioned an alien hat.  She wore it a lot and I always meant to photograph it properly but sadly it has gone AWOL at this point.  I only have a pretty ropey picture of her in it…

A couple of valentine hats

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These are two hats I did quite a long time ago that work with valentines coming this week.  I made the one on the left first and was not happy with the result.  I tweaked things a bit and made the other one, which I was happier with and have shown in two views.

Back to basics…felting again

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I decided to work out how to do a bit of a brim on a basic felted hat shape.

Basic felted hat with brim

Basic felted hat with brim

This hat could probably be used as a base for decoration like the pillbox, but I am showing it plain first.

Do it yourself: Patons Classic Wool size 4 1/2mm needles

Brim:  Cast on 200 stitches,  I worked the brim in garter stitch…knit one round, purl one round, decreasing was done on every other knit round (4th, 8th, 12th,16th and 20th rounds). There were 10 stitches decreased evenly around on each of the 5 decrease rounds, and the decreases were staggered each time.

Body: When you down to 150 stitches, continue in stocking stitch (knit every round) until work measures 9 1/2″ (24 cm) from the beginning.

Top: Next round *knit 27, slip 1, k2 tog, psso* repeat around (this will dec 10 stitches around).  Knit 2 rounds plain.  *knit 25, slip 1, k2 tog, psso* repeat around.  Knit 2 rounds plain….continue in this manner doing the decreases with two plain rounds between until after the row with *knit 15, slip 1 k2 tog, psso* at this point start putting only one plain round between until the round with *knit 3, slip 1 k2 tog, psso* after this round, keep knitting 2 together constantly until you have 7 stitches left.  Break your yarn and pull it through.

Run a string round the point at which the brim meets the body of the hat.  Pull it to the correct diameter for your head and tie with a reef knot.  Send the hat through the washer, dryer, and washer with laundry.  Dry on a form.