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!