Nov 18 2004
Man in Hat
I admit this doesn’t look very impressive, but I’m proud of myself for knitting something without using a pattern, so I’m posting a couple of pictures of it:
Poor, sleepy husband, caught unawares with a funky hat on his head and a camera in his face…
I’m still trying to decide if this hat is worthy enough for my father. Last year, I knit Coronet for him and made a terrible mess of it. I waited until the last possible minute to knit the darned thing before he came to visit during the holidays and I didn’t have any time to rip and redo. In my haste, I somehow missed the instruction (printed in red) to pick up stitches around the hat band with the wrong side facing out. Well, you can guess what happened. When I finished, I realized that I couldn’t turn up the band as you were supposed to do without the wrong side facing out. Poor dad got a very tall and ill-fitting hat, which he still insists on wearing because his dear daughter made it for him.
Awww.
I vowed to make him a much nicer hat this year, and the project pictured above was my first attempt at it. I like it. I think it’s cute…but still, it’s finished off with a different kind of yarn. It’s imperfect, and my father really deserves a perfect hat. Thank goodness there are weeks and weeks left before Christmas!
And just because it’s my blog and I can post cute photos if I want to:
If you’d like the easy hat pattern, read the extended entry
The :devil: is in the details:
* I suspect the yarn is Noro Big Kureyon (I’m not sure because I only had a little bit of it left from some ancicent project and it was sans label). I ran out of it when doing the final decreases, so I added a bit of charcoal colored chunky Lamb’s pride. It blended in nicely.
* Size 13 needles, approx. 3 stitches per inch x 4 rows per inch.
* I cast on 60 stitches and knit in the round until I felt it was tall enough. (I frequently tried it on my head…no matter where I happened to be. I’m sure the folks at the seminar I attended thought I was a lunatic sitting there with a half-knit hat on my head, needles poking out every which way…)
* When the tube was tall enough, I divided the stitches into six sections and decreased evenly across every other round until only 6 stitches were left. (First decrease round: *k2tog, k8, repeat from * across the round; 2nd decrease round: *k2tog, k7, repeat from *, etc.)
* I omitted the plain knitted rounds between the last four or five decrease rounds. (At first I didn’t and ended up with a very pointy top. I didn’t want my father to look like a big elf, after all).
*When only six stitches were left, I broke the yarn and pulled it through the live stitches. I then wove in all the ends. Easy as pie!
