Tag Archives: hat

is it time for wool hats yet?

Yes it is. I took these pictures yesterday in beautiful, chilly sunset  light, and this morning, looking at the sun rising on my city, there are big snowflurries in the air, settling on the mountaintops right across the valley. We’re on the brink of winter, and I’m finding the need to get my woolens in order – taking them out of storage, washing them, and mending them.

knitted wool cable hat

This hat should look pretty familiar. I made one, almost identical, last winter. It ended up a little too big, so I cast on fewer stitches this time, and went to it. I love the pattern for this hat, with the perfect rhythm of cables in different sizes. The yarn came from a merino wool sweater that I took apart, and the yarn is so thin I had to knit with 4 strands at once! (The pattern is Kristen of KristenMakes’s Cabled Watch-cap, and my ravelry notes are here)

The picture is a little blown out, but I’m pleased with how the cables merged for the decreasing at the crown.

I am really intrigued by decreases at the crown of hats. The best ones are little fantastic little design-puzzles, where the pattern melds perfectly with shaping the crown, and ends up in a circle, or swirling lines, or cables integral to the pattern itself. Working with this hat, I thought of a fun challenge – making a top down hat to really make the shaping of the crown and the pattern there the star of the show. I’ll just add that to the other 7 projects I’m currently working on and planning. (meaning, maybe in two years I’ll get around it!)

I was left to my own devices to take these photos, and it involved a lot of running back and forth, crouching, trying to be in focus, and in frame! I missed a couple, as you can see, but I did want to share a side picture of the hat and all the cables.

Now, what is happening to the other hat? I don’t need two almost identical hats around, especially with one being too big, so the first hat is being sent off to live with a friend with a bigger head! I know it fits her, and I’m happy that the hat can go be useful somewhere else. Win win all around!

reversible biking hat – alterations

The autumn hat I shared recently is one I based on my pattern The Reversible Biking hat. I’ve made a few of them now, so knowing the pattern pretty well, I wanted to change it up a bit. And altering knitting patterns to fit your own needs really isn’t that hard! Here is what I did/what you can do:

First, I used a different yarn, which usually means a different gauge. The gauge in the original pattern is 24 stitches per 4 inches, or 6 stitches per inch. My gauge for this new yarn was around 17 per 4 inches, or 4,3 stitches per inch. How many stitches do I need to cast on to make the same size? (hmm, I sound like a math book problem!)

The circumference of the hat is 18 inches, and with 4.3 stitches to the inch of my gauge, I simply multiply the goal number of inches with the amount of stitches per inch my gauge is:

18 x 4,3 = 77,4 (≈78)
goal # of inches x your stitches pr inch = amount to cast on.

At this point, you might have to make some adjustments to your cast on number. If there is a repeat pattern, the number for your cast on has to be a multiple of that. In this case, the repeat pattern I used is 6 (p1, k5), and 78 is divisible by 6, so I’m all set. Alternatively, if you have a cuff or a brim, you can adjust the number of stitches up or down in the first round after the cuff.

reversible biking hat

Another thing I did to change the look of this hat, was to stagger the 5-row repeats and create diagonal lines instead of straight lines. This is also quite simple; at the first round of the repeated section, knit the first stitch, then do the section as normal. You’ve effectively just nudged the pattern over by one stitch, and when you keep nudging at the beginning of every repeat, you get diagonal lines!

Reversible biking hat

When you tweak the number of stitches, one thing is to be aware of the stitches in each repeat. The other is to be mindful of the decreasing. The Reversible Biking Hat is pretty simple in how it decreases, so the major thing to consider here is that I have an odd number of repeats (13) instead of an even number of repeats (24) like the original has. This means that while most knit stitches in the very last row corresponds to two whole sections, there is one left over that corresponds to the last, thirtheenth section. That is ok – you can cut the tail and loop through the rest of the stitches that turns out to be 14, instead of 12.

The more intricate the pattern and the decrease design, and the longer the repeat is, the harder it is to substitue numbers. But for relative simple designs like this one, all you need is a little math!

If you have any questions, or if something was unclear, do please ask!

on the needles: autumn hats

Photo by John B.

Well, this hat is clearly not on the needles anymore! All of our winter stuff is currently being shipped from Chicago to Bergen, so no matter how many hats and socks I’ve knit before – we need some hats and socks right here, right now!

I used my Reversible biking hat pattern, but tweaked it so the pattern goes in a diagonal line, instead of straight up. It’s a little hard to see in that picture, but I’m coming back with a post on how to customize the pattern! (Ravelry page here)

My other hat project is KristenMakes‘ beautiful Cabled Watchcap. I absolutely love her pattern, and the only reason mine looks a little different is that I am torturing challenging myself. I decided to frog a thriftstore sweater that was incredibly fine knit, and reasonably enough – the yarn is about the thinnest I’ve ever seen. It’s hardly thicker than sewing thread! I’m holding it quadruple, and it is still producing such tiny stitches, haha!

You can see in the top left corner how wavy the yarn is too, since I didn’t wash it after frogging the sweater. The knitting is a little rippely at the moment, but I’m hoping a good soak after I’m done with the hat will take care of that!

Tasia of Sewaholic had an interesting post a couple of days ago, about memories connected with things you make – she asked “Do you remember what you were thinking while you make things?” I often have strong memories of what I was watching while making things; my mustard colored socks remind me of watching the 1995 BBC version of “Pride and Predjudice”, and this hat is already becoming my “House of Eliott” project, incidentally another BBC-production. I’m sure they plan their mini-series for us knitting people in mind!

a sweater, two hats, and a pattern of sorts

The first  sweater I successfully frogged, or recycled for it’s yarn, was a charcoal wool/cotton blend Eddie Bauer specimen:

Even after knitting an entire new sweater for the boy, there was still a whole lot of yarn left. It was like an endless supply! Alongside the seamless sweater, there now exists an almost finished scarf, a baby-hat, a pair of socks, and,two adult-sized hats from this one original sweater.

The first of the hats I made, was the Butterfly beret by Rachel Iufer (ravelry link here). My Eddie Bauer yarn was thinner than what the pattern called for, so I ended up adding some repeats, both in width and length, to get the right size. The butterfly stitch is very clever, and it was an enjoyable and fairly easy knit. This is a gift for a friend, so hopefully she’ll be equally as happy with the hat as I am!

And now for something kind of exciting. I knitted a second hat, and this one I concocted the pattern for all by myself. This isn’t terribly unusual or noteworthy – a lot of my projects involve making things up as I go, and re-doing until I satisfied. What is exciting is that after knitting this self-composed hat twice, I’ve decided to write out the directions and publish it as a free pattern! I hope to have it finalized within a couple of days, so keep an eye out for:

the Reversible biking hat!


(ETA: The pattern is now available in this blogpost!)