Sunday, December 23, 2007

Experimental hat

Guess what I did this afternoon (before meeting up for dinner)? I knit a hat! I had two skeins of Queensland Uruguay DK that I bought on super-sale at Webs, and I'd always wanted to try the fair isle part of the Cheesylove pattern (without actually knitting the whole sweater of course!), so I thought I'd use the opportunity to put the two together.

I've knit enough plain stockinette hats now that the recipe is pretty much automatic, so I knit a small gauge swatch, cast on 96 stitches, knit some K2P2 ribbing, switched to stockinette, knit the fair isle pattern (bordered by some stripes), and decreased for the crown.

Cheesylove hat_02

After my experience with the Main Street Fair Isle, I figured that I should probably knit the colourwork fairly loosely as I expected the hat to have to stretch a decent amount (my head is 21-22 inches around, the hat was knit to be 18-19 inches around unstretched) and I didn't want to risk the fair isle part being too small. So I knit VERY LOOSELY. The floats were VERY LONG. Too long, in fact. Why is it so hard to get the tension just right? The inside of my hat now consists of a lot of loopy bits. And there are a lot of loose stitches on the outside. Not the most attractive.

Another thing was that I decided that the ribbing was too long after having completed the entire hat, so I had to cut the yarn and unravel all of the ribbing so I could do it over again (from top down). Not a horrid thing, but a bit inconvenient.

Cheesylove hat_03

Will I wear this hat? Who knows? It will probably be relatively warm due to the brim and the fair isle floats, but I may not be brave enough to wear this in public with all of its imperfections. Maybe a good blocking would fix it some?

Sophie doesn't really have an opinion, she pretty much hates hats in general.

Cheesylove hat Sophie_02

1 comment:

Karen said...

Wow. You're speedy! And the hat is very cute! When you look at the photos, you really can't tell that there are loose stitches or anything like that at all. I think the Fair Isle looks great; you're becoming a colour-work expert!!