Hat! It’s a Hat!

I’m very excited and proud that I produced a hat. I started it a few days ago and finished last night.

I know that this is simple and easy, but I’m just a knit-beginner and I’m delighted to produce something that I can use.

I was excited because this is a step up in complexity from the very simple garter-stitch scarf I made last spring. I wanted to do something that taught me new things, but didn’t stress my skills too much and I feel that this hat was just about perfect. I’m happy that it’s wearable because I thought for the whole time it was going to be too small. As you can see from the picture, it’s just about right.

I learned/practiced several things on this project:

• How to move back and forth between knit and purl stitches easily
• How to make a slip-slip-knit stitch (ssk) which is used for reducing the number of stitches in your row (with a left lean!)
• How to (and how not to) knit in the round on a circular needle and double-pointed needles
• How to really lose track of your stitch count and ways to keep track after the fact
• How to fix some big problems that I didn’t notice when I was doing them
• How to recognize knit and purl stitches when they’re mixed in with each other

One of the important pattern-related things I learned was to not accidentally turn inside-out the project and start knitting the other way. You’ll notice in the picture that the texture of the hat changes from top to bottom. That’s not supposed to be like that. Somehow I managed to turn the work inside out about halfway done and I didn’t notice until I was a few rows further along. I decided not to worry about it and you can see it doesn’t deleteriously affect the aesthetic of my hat. It adds some additional texture. Nevertheless, that wasn’t supposed to happen.

I also learned that it can be difficult keeping track of your stitches when you’ve moved onto double-pointed needles. At least, it can be when you use three of them instead of four and end up with a different number of stitches on one needle and the (conveniently mod-8) stitch pattern starts making you keep track of ssk’s and other stitches while switching between needles. I totally lost the number of stitches I was supposed to have with about five rows left. Again, I decided not to worry about it and just finish up.

The last thing I learned was how depressing it can be when, after you’ve weaved the ends and snipped the threads, you find a dropped stitch that’s starting to unravel. I rescued it and moved it back to it’s position then tied it onto the rest of the hat with a spare piece of yarn, which works, but it’s still annoying and I wish I hadn’t dropped that.

I have about another 1.2 skeins of that same yarn. I may do a slightly different pattern and make a small hat for Griffin, so we can match!