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.