More Than Just a Hat

Forest

More hats. So what is special about these hats? The yarn! They are from Patty at Sporfarm in The Dalles, Oregon.

Vineyard is hand-spun merino, fingering weight. Forest is wool, closer to worsted weight. Sporfarm yarns have beautiful colors and are a joy to knit with. I have a little of each left over that will show up in some other project.


The pattern is Heads are Round, a great, all-purpose top-down hat pattern. They look a little pointy-headed on my “model” but they fit very well on a real head.

Vineyard

Love–Hate

Pattern: Heads are Round
from the Top Down by
Christy Cooper

I usually don’t say much about hats and similar items, and this post is not about hats. It is about the yarn. Which I love. And hate.

The yarn is Manos del Uruguay Rittenhouse merino 5-ply.

This is what I like:

• Manos is a non-profit organization that promotes economic and social opportunities for rural women through yarn. Each of the two skeins I bought included information on the village and the artisan.
• The colors are gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous.
• The yarn is soft and lovely to knit with.

What I hate:

• Knots. Each skein had at least two knots. Grrrrrrrrrr.
• The yarn stretches a lot when washed and blocked. I ended up ripping out each hat and re-knitting it with fewer stitches. Yes, I could have swatched. But I have knit dozens and dozens of hats with all kinds of yarn and have never seen one that stretches this much. And I am a tight knitter; I knit these on US4 needles.

I wish the “loves” clearly outweighed the “hates,” but I am not sure.

Boyfriend Hat by
Stephanie Nicole

I Love This Hat

The hat that I love is Quincy, by Jared Flood. This is just the latest of several Quincy hats I have made.

As usual, the details:

• Yarn: Lana Grossa Royal Tweed; 100% merino; 50 grams, 100 meters. The hat took only one skein, but it took all of that skein.
• Needles: US9 and US8. (5.5mm and 5mm).
• Finished size: A little large for the “model" but just right for a real person, especially one who does not like a tight hat squeezing her head (that is, me).

Hat Trick

I have been knitting hats recently. Must be the cold weather. My friend Jane had knit the Debbie Bliss Cabled Beret, which I liked a lot. The pattern as written is knit flat; I changed it to knit in the round.

I started with some Cascade 220, color 4008. Knowing that I am a relaxed (very relaxed) knitter, I used 2.75mm (US2) needles for the ribbing and 3.75mm (US5) needles for the body, sizes I usually use with worsted-weight yarn. The result is a nice hat, but not a beret.

Could I make it more floppy and beret-like? Yes, with bigger needles. I retained the 2.75mm needles for the ribbing but went to 4.5mm (US7) for the body. The yarn is Plymouth Galway Colornet, color 565. Ta-da! A beret!

The red hat has a finished weight of 84 grams. The green one has a finished weight of 102 grams. That's a difference of 22 percent!

And, yes, I know that a hat trick needs three. So here's the third hat, based on Jared Flood's Turn a Square hat. I like the shaping on this hat. The blue is Brown Sheep Top of the Lamb in Blue Flannel; the stripes are Cascade 220 in color 8404 (brown) and color 8021 (off-white). Needles are US3 for the ribbing and US4 for the body. Yes, relaxed knitter.

A Hat

I haven't posted recently because I haven't finished anything recently, except for a hat. But I think it's a pretty hat. It was a bit of a challenge, because I had only one skein of the multi-color green yarn. I opted for a top-down hat, figuring I would knit as much of the green as possible, then switch to something else for the ribbing. Finding a complementary color and weight was harder than I thought it would be.

The details:

• Pattern: Karlchen
  
• Yarn for top of hat: OnLine Linie 50 (discontinued?), viscose-cotton-linen blend, 50 grams, 88 meters
• Yarn for ribbing: Pima Tencel, cotton-Tencel blend
• Needles: US4 for top, US2 for ribbing

A Winter Hat

My gift in the Puyallup Knitting Guild holiday gift exchange was this pattern and yarn for a winter hat. Twined knitting. Not my favorite type of knitting, with all of the twisting and untwisting, but the hat and yarn were so pretty that I was willing to give it a go. That, and Joyce egged me on: "You can do this, you can do this."

The timing was excellent because we have had a cold winter and this is a snuggly, soft, warm hat with earflaps. I really like this hat, and I even warmed up (a little bit) to twined knitting.

The details:

• Lisa Ellis Designs Basic Twined Ski Hat
• Yarn: Crystal Palace Taos, 100 percent wool, 1 skein (128 yards), color 02 Gila Bend; trim is Cascade 220 in a sage green from stash
  
• Needles: US6
• Finished size: Adult

Barter

See the guy on the left with the hat? That's Tristan, a member of the University of Puget Sound crew team. Tristan traveled to England last summer. I asked him to bring me a 500-gram tin of Twinings Earl Grey or English Breakfast from the duty-free shop at Heathrow. He did. He also brought back lots more tea, lots and lots of lovely tea. He refused payment but was persuaded to accept a wool knit hat for those cold, wet mornings when the team practices.