I decided to quit waffling, already, and finish the second hat. I didn’t give it a point like the boob hat had, and when I screwed up a stitch finishing the crown in the My Gym waiting room, I thought, “eh, she’ll never know” and kept knitting. It turned out better than it looked like it was going to in the first picture. In fact, she loved it, as you can see. Sometimes you shouldn’t overthink things.
For those who care about such things:
1 skein kureyon
size 9 16″ circular and double-pointed needles.
Long-tail cast-on.
On circular needles, co 88 stitches. Place marker at beginning of row.
Knit in the round for about 4 1/2 to 5 inches.
To decrease:
row 1: From marker, *k9, k2tog* repeating * to end of row.
row 2: knit
row 3: *k8, k2tog* repeating * to end of row.
row 4: knit
row 5: *k7, k2tog* repeating * to end of row.
row 6: knit
Switch to double-pointed needles when the work gets too small.
Keep repeating this pattern until you’re down to, like, 32 stitches or so. Then omit the plain knit row and just keep up the decrease pattern, otherwise you’ll get down to 4 stitches and have a boob point. Unless that’s your thang.
When you’re down to 8 stitches (or 4, to taste) using yarn needle, pull end of yarn through remaining stitches and weave in ends. (Or cheat like me and knot it).
FYI, I have a 22 inch head, so you can figure that with 88 stitches, your gauge is probably going to be about 4 stitches to an inch.
(2008 note – at the time I wrote this pattern, I was a tight knitter. You might want to pop down to a size 8 needle.)
Math AND fashion! It’s the ultimate geek girl craft!
February 26th, 2004
admin
Just when I begin to think that it’s time to move on to summer stuff comes a reminder that it is February. And so, to those who say I knit a lot, I say, at least the people I love are warm!
Well, as I said, I promised my daughter her own little purple fuzzy hat, and here it is.
This was the same pattern, adhered to more closely. The difference here is that instead of a strand of sport-weight wool with the purple, I used a strand of sport-weight cotton, Mission Falls 1824. It was a perfect color match for the purple, so I got lucky. I think the cotton might make the hat a little heavier than a really thin wool (lighter than sport-weight) would have, but the cotton does have pretty good loft and my daughter doesn’t seem to mind. She likes it because it looks a little like the hat the title character in this book wears.
Hopefully after I take care of more wedding work tonight (love is in the air this month, I’ll tell ya!) I’ll be able to start on the other projects that’ve been stacking up.
(Liddsville for those not familiar with Sid and Marty Krofft.)
The ice storm (and intermittent cable outages) inspired me to knit a hat.
This was an experiment in using circular and double-pointed needles. It turned out to be a learning experience in other ways too. Lessons learned: swatch for gauge! I was sort of basing it off of this pattern, but decided that instead of size 8 needles, since I wanted it bigger, I’d use 11’s. Besides, I was using Berroco’s Chinchilla Bulky instead of Chinchilla, which knits up, well, bulky. However, I omitted the wool, which would have provided more firmness, in retrospect. The result of going into it blind instead of swatching for gauge (knitting a test patch to see whether or not the stitches will be the size you need) was that the hat is too big and too loose. Warm, though.
Other lesson: Chinchilla bulky is a bear to fix mistakes in. It’s so fuzzy you can’t see the stitches to correct any problems. On the up side, it’s so fuzzy you can’t see the problems, either, so it works right out.
My daughter, however, loves it. She wants me to make a little one, just for her. When we went out earlier, she insisted on wearing my hat, and I had to wear hers. She’s four, so we drew some looks. I think she’s got kind of a Grimace from McDonald’s thing going on there, but still, she’s mighty cute.
This will be of absolutely no interest to anyone but other knitters, and I don’t know how many of those we have in DR. But let me just be up front and say don’t be a piker on yarn.
I was knitting a fuzzy purple scarf for Tessima, and one of the girls at My Gym was admiring it. I told her if I had enough yarn left over, I’d make her one too. Well, I didn’t have enough Plymouth Firenze left over, and I don’t know this girl that well, so I thought I’d try it with the cheap stuff, Bernat Boa from my local Michael’s craft shop.
Big mistake.
I’ve seen some bloggers posting about how soft this stuff is. It’s not soft. It’s like wearing barbed wire wrapped in fake feathers. The Firenze is soft and fuzzy, and it’s hard to stop stroking it. It’s dyed in nice long strips, so the color is in wide bands. The Bernat changes color every couple of inches. It looked like a giant iridescent zig-zag that was hurting my eyes while I was knitting it. I couldn’t unravel the Bernat fast enough to get it off my needles.
So now I know why the Bernat was $5 for a 50 gram ball and why the Firenze was $11 (yes, Tessima comped me). You really get what you pay for.
What’d Tessima’s scarf look like? Ask her! She still owes me a picture!
I decided to quit waffling, already, and finish the second hat. I didn’t give it a point like the boob hat had, and when I screwed up a stitch finishing the crown in the My Gym waiting room, I thought, “eh, she’ll never know” and kept knitting. It turned out better than it looked like it was going to in the first picture. In fact, she loved it, as you can see. Sometimes you shouldn’t overthink things.
