A Tale of Two Hats (and Scarves) Part II

Kasia and I went to Michael's, and she picked out the hat and yarn she wanted for Elsa. She wanted it to tie on , because Elsa doesn't particularly like having a hat on her head, and she wanted 100% cotton to be gentle to sweet baby skin. Here is a picture of the selected pattern, and the cotton yarn is the same Lily Sugar and Cream that I use for all the dish cloths.  It's a pretty multi-color with blue, green, and yellow mixed in. I told Kasia I couldn't add the little pattern that is shown, but she wanted it solid, so we were good to go.

It has the little ear flaps to keep her warm, and ties to keep it on. The flaps are knit using a technique called wrap and turn.

Thank goodness for YouTube. I would never have understood this without watching someone do it. Let's get started.

First, you knit the ear flaps using the aforementioned wrap and turn. It's all knit flat at this point.



Then you knit a few more rows to get the back up to the right height and cast on some more stitches that will become the round part that frames her face. After casting on, I was ready to join in the round, so I switched to a long cable and set it up for magic loop. The orange stitch marker represents where each round begins and ends.

I've split the stitches in half at the point that will be at the top of her forehead and pulled the long loop out there, on the left, and I've joined in the round. In the finished hat, the point where the loop comes out (green stitch marker) ended up being a little bit wide, due to the constant pressure of the cable. I kind of coaxed it back tighter when I washed the hat, but I need to study up on how to prevent that.

I've knit halfway, to the green stitch marker, and done the magic loop do-si-do where you drop the empty needle, reload, and return the two halves to the starting position.



Now some more boring stuff happened and I kept knitting the stockinette stitch until it was as tall as it needed to be. This is a few rows later. Remember how I told you in Part I that stockinette rolls? On this hat, it has been stabilized because the ear flaps and the first nine rows of the body of the hat are in garter stitch.

There are no more interim pictures. I have done the decreases according to the pattern. In this one, there is one round of continued knitting at the smaller circumference before the next decrease. I like that. I think the sudden decreases on Kent's hat made it a little bit pucker-y. Here it has been decreased to four stitches, and it's ready to cinch up.

The final steps were to add a pom-pom at the top and knit icord ties. Yay! An excuse to buy a pom-pom maker! I'll toss in a couple of videos about those items here. I didn't take any progress pictures as I added them to this hat. The icord was pretty neat in that it's not sewn on, but just knit into the stitches at the edges of the ear flaps.

I had lots of yarn left over, since we bought three balls, not thinking that two of them were for other colors in the original. So I decided to knit a cowl. I squeezed it onto a 16" cord and knit it all in a 2x2 rib stitch. It came out much larger than I thought it would, so right now I'm working on another scarf that I intend to knit flat and then sew the ends together into a neck warmer. Here's our lovely model.

See how loose the cowl is? Nathan couldn't get her to keep the hat on, but he had the bright idea of adding a hoodie, and she was OK with it then. Here's the other scarf in progress.

Just a little stockinette, bordered by some seed stitches. I really should concentrate and get it finished, now that the weather's getting colder. I have a set of pot holders going for Jason, a headband for myself, a constant dish cloth for bus knitting, and I'm making "plarn" from plastic Target bags to I can knit or crochet shopping bags from it. But, I'm all hot and bothered about crocheting a blanket for Elsa, so I'm probably going to get that going, too. Here is the selected yarn, Lily Sugar and Cream Pretty Pastels. I have crocheted a gauge swatch using a solid yellow of the same yarn and the pattern I chose from the book I bought. We'll see which project gets completed and added to the blog first. Happy Knitting and Hooking!

A Tale of Two Hats (and Scarves) Part I

OK. I knew I wanted to make a hat for my sweet Elsa, but I needed to knit an easy one first. Enter Kent The Guinea Pig. We went to the store and shopped for yarn together. He chose an 80% Acrylic 20% Alpaca blend in a nice, manly brown color. I decided to use the easiest possible pattern, shown here:

All the scribbles are where I decided how many stitches to cast on so it would fit his head. It had to be a multiple of 8. I decided on 104, and I placed stitch markers every 8 so I could keep track of them.





This is maybe the third time I have started this hat over. The first time, I had the yarn coming from the left needle, as usual, and I was surprised that I was knitting a flat sheet, instead of a tube, as I intended.

The next time I started it over, I tried to use the magic loop method. (More later.) I got my halves mixed up, and after a while, I kept adding length to one half, while the other half remained short.

Then, I decided I'd work at knitting in the round and ignore magic loop until I got ready to decrease the stitches. So, I cast my 104 stitches on again, and started knitting away using a 24" circular set.

Remember I said the locking of the tips to the cable would become important later? Let's back up to the post about my purchase of the interchangeable needle set. Here's a picture of a cable ready to connect to the tip, with its little key sticking out.

The tip screws onto the cable threads, and the key gives you leverage to tighten it up. On this hat, somewhere around 4" in length, one of my tips became disconnected from its cable. I lost everything, because I was unable to pick each of the stitches back up when I tried to insert a lifeline after the fact. I kept getting off by a row or something.

So, I finally had my act together. Knit in the proper direction. Actually join in the round, instead of knitting flat on round needles. Check the integrity of the cable and tip joints on a regular basis. Insert lifelines frequently. So, here's the final cast-on. We're ready to go!

What's wrong with this picture, you say? Could it be that I don't have any working yarn, but instead I have two tails? You are correct! After I cast on my stitches, I cut the wrong yarn. It kind of reminds me of Apollo 13, when Kevin Bacon put duct tape over the switch that would separate the command module from the LEM, because they were living in it at the time. He didn't want to accidentally eject Tom Hanks and Bill Paxton. But I digress.

It was easy to attach the working yarn and bury the joint in the rolled brim of the hat. Hardly a kill-the-astronauts sort of disaster.

Here we are, joined in the round, ready to add some height!

We have our height. See how the brim rolls? The stockinette stitch just naturally wants to do that. That's why, when you buy a sweater, there's usually a few inches of rib stitch at the bottom, to prevent this from happening. Here I have switched from the 24" cable to the 40" one so I can use the magic loop. I've also switched to my new wood tips because the set came while I was working on this project, and the metal tips are just too darned slippery.

So, what's magic loop? It's a method of knitting in the round without the need to resort to using double-pointed needles. When the circumference of the knitted item becomes much smaller than your circular needles, you have to switch to something smaller. Here's an excellent video that explains what's going on here:

MAGIC LOOP

If you don't do the magic loop, you have to use three or more double-pointed needles, and I obviously don't have the skills to keep track of that!

DOUBLE-POINTED NEEDLES

So, I finally got the hang of the magic loop and started decreasing stitches by knitting two of every set of eight together, until I had nine stitches left at the crown, ran the yarn through them, cinched them up and tied up the hat.

Kent models with his World Series shirt. I had some yarn left over, and the desire to learn crochet, so I found this easy pattern on the Lion Brand website. You simply do every row in a half double crochet, and it comes out nicely ribbed. I did take a crochet class at Jo-Ann because the books and YouTube just weren't doing it for me. The hat took one ball and part of another. The scarf used it up, and I also ended up buying another ball of yarn. It's still a little shorter than I'd like, but he's fine with it. The set:

Now I'm ready to rock and roll on Elsa's! To be continued.