FO: Plethora of Hats

A cold chill has swept the land.  After a bit of petered-out hurricane Gonzalo blew through England, it went from balmy and windy, to rainy and windy, to cold and windy in a 24 hour period.   Sweater weather!  Cuddly hats and snugly scarfs and indulging in all sorts of edibles that you've been turning your nose up all summer.  Sweet potatoes and soups and sweet potato soup, squash and crispy sweet apples and I've not turned down any offers of hot chocolate.

I've been plugging away on hats.  It's become a bit of a joke in my knit circle: another week, another hat.  And it's true, I've been knocking out about one a week.  These aren't difficult patterns, and most of them are worsted-weight, so it only takes me a few hours a piece.  

As always, fantastic gifts.  All of these are being flung to the four corners of the earth.

First up: 

The Botanic Hat, a clever little Stephen West Beanie.  It's completely reversible, and looks remarkably different when you give it a flip.

See?  The best thing about this is that when I finished, I weighed the leftover skeins and realized I had enough for a mirror-image:

The pair of hats used exactly two skeins of Rowan Lima, an alpaca yarn that makes me rethink alpaca yarn.  It's velevety.  Instead of being twisted into plies, it is chained, so it makes for less drapey structure-less fabric as it seems to behave much more like wool.  It's not bad at all..

Another creating- the Windsor Hat.  It's a free pattern on the Rowan site and I loved how feminine and girly it was (and I'm not a girly girl by any means).  The pattern was a huge pain in the ass though- it was written Rowan-style to be knitted flat, which is as complicated as you could possibly get.  Still- it is slouchy and warm and after a glance at the pattern, I was able to improvise and knit it in the round, and all was right in the world once again.

The yarn was an odd skein of Creative Worsted, a wool/mohair blend, and the pink was leftovers of Swans Island worsted Merino from my Wayfarer scarf.  

This bad boy is going to a friend of mine who just moved from a balmy climate to a cold one:

It's the Greenery hat.  I made an extra-thick brim so it can be worn as a big slouch or doubled over the ears (which hides the cabling a bit, eh?).  The yarn?  Ah, the yarn.  A few skeins of wool yarn I picked up at Monoprix in Paris out of pure curiosity.  While I miss Monoprix badly (like Target in the US, they had great chic clothes) this yarn was not the best.  It was really dense- this hat is heavy!- and had a weird acrylic-like squeak even though it was pure wool.  It's not terribly scratchy though, and I think it will keep a head very warm.

Finally:

I used all the scraps that haunt the flat from the ghosts of hats past and made a Kex hat, another  reversible beanie from Stephen West.  I've been making a ton of his patterns lately...I just find they are brilliantly unisex and uniquely constructed.  

I have some more projects to flaunt, but some are gifts and need to be gifted first, but I'm enjoying this sudden drop of temperature to inspire me to cover everyone I know in wool.  

FO: Habitat hat

Another day, another hat.

This one will be gifted to the aforementioned friend.  He gets a cable hat, but not the orange one.  That one is mine.  He gets this one instead:

It's the Habitat beanie, another elegantly cabled and wearable Brooklyn Tweed pattern.  I think this one is a bit more masculine looking and better suited for a guy anyway.  Not that I want to apply gender stereotypes to knitwear and colors.  This is actually 100% unisex.

Another skein of Juno Fibre Arts gone.  In a panic, I sent an email to the dyer as I can't find any more of the BFL on her website or etsy shop.  This is my new favorite yarn.

FO: A couple of hats....

I think I might have expressed this before, but I do love making hats.

They take very little time.  I can usually crank one out in four hours or so, unless it is with very skinny yarn or very complicated.  That's about a week's worth of commuting time, or some idle tv time in the evenings.  Speaking of which, 2007 called and I'm really into the Danish show "The Killing" right now, and it's NOT JUST BECAUSE OF THE AWESOME KNITWEAR.  Why am I watching a dark, wintry, Danish crime drama in high summer?  I can't answer that, but the UK Netflix doesn't get nearly as many films as the US counterpart, and it's mostly loaded with British sitcoms, which, like almost all sitcoms, I find insufferable.    

Anyway, hats make fantastic gifts.  Everyone could use one.  Or eight.  I made these both as gifts.  They also take up odd skeins of yarn- a ball leftover from a sweater, some scraps from your scrap bin, a skein that you impulsively bought with no real project in mind for but you just had to try it.  

First up is the Nantes hat from Interweave Knits Winter 2011.  

It's got the perfect amount of cables and lace, making a lovely cathedral-like pattern.  I loved this pattern and will be making it again in the future.

I made mine slouchy, but you could go down a needle size and make a beanie and it would work as well.  I do love slouchy over-sized hats.  I tend to not wear hats with the brims straight across my forehead, but I rather like to push them back so they cover my ears.

The yarn is Rowan Pure Wool Aran, a soft superwash wool.  It comes in 186 yard balls, and I shortened the pattern by three rows so I would have enough yarn to finish it nicely.

Next up is the Nottingham hat.  I used a skein of Quince and Co Osprey leftover from my Aidez cardigan that I made last winter.  The color is pea-green, which, honestly, is a tough color to pull off this close to your face.

It's slouchy as well.  Almost rasta-like, but I did want to use up every last bit of wool.  The lace pattern makes nice diagonals, it was simple and it looks fantastically hip if you can pull off this color green.

These will both be gifted eventually.  The right person, the right season.  No one I know is allowed to be cold.  

FO: Beaufort Hat

My, my. I do make a lot of hats.

They seem to be my chosen way to use up odd skeins leftover from sweaters. I can usually turn one out in a few hours if it's a worsted weight yarn, and it's no problem sizing it up or down depending on your yardage. I give them away as freely as a fireship gives away herpes, but you know. Most people think of me fondly for the hats.

Beaufort is a lovely lace cap.

Easy to make, easy to adjust. This yarn will not die and I'm so sick of it but I can't let that ruin a perfectly nice hat. Cascade 200 tweed in Stone Beige.

FO: Binary Cable Hat

Another quick gift hat for a friend:

It's the Binary Cable Hat- a functional cabled beanie with a fibonacci sequence of cables for the nerdlings who love these sorts of things. It used a bit less of a skein of Cascade 220 Tweed and FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, WHY CAN'T I EVER GET RID OF THIS YEARN FROM MY STASH. There's always an odd half skein lying around.

FO: Foliage Hat

Hello! I've missed our fireside chats as of late. I've had some adventures, and I'm planning more, and eventually there will be pictures of everything. I have a hard time sitting down and collecting my thoughts at times, and I'm just going through one of those phases. It doesn't help that I've taken thousands of pictures in the past couple weeks, and I'll probably take hundreds more before the weekend is through.

When I go back through the years of archived photographs I have, I find it really amazing how the switch to digital really influenced my style. Back when I had my big clunky Minolta SLR and film and the cost of developing and printing was not cheap, I shot so sparingly. Like, life events were marked by just a photo or two of carefully timed and composed shots. When I made the switch to digital, I shot in much the same fashion: early trips abroad were marked by a few photos here and there of something interesting I saw, and I was always a bit worried about running out of battery and memory (those early digital big cameras were battery beasts, especially in the cold). So now that memory is cheap and the camera is dependable, I've been insane. I'm surprised that the shutter button on the camera isn't worn down to nothing, or I've done some permanent damage to my right index finger. And, being me, I have to spend some time whittling down those thousands to a select few that I thought were decent enough to share. I really dislike it when people are all, "here, see all the pictures I took" and they leave in all their duds, blurry, out of focus and not really illustrating much of anything, and you are left flipping through dozens of pictures of their hotel room in Fiji or the view from their balcony overlooking the parking lot in Lisbon, searching for a hint at what really happened on their trip. Booooring.

Anyway.

Here's a hat I made.

The process of springtime has been quite slow all over the world it seems. I'm still quite chilly here, especially at night. I half-heartedly put away my winter coat only to pull it back out again, and I watch the sad struggle of the cherry trees trying to blossom in what amounts to November. I keep churning out hats, and recipients keep grabbing them up and they are getting wear despite it being the time of year where you start to think about a pedicure.

The pattern is Foliage from Knitty.com. Easy lace, I made it with a bit of ease as to be slouchy. It's blaze-orange Cascade 220 tweed, which is an excellent fashion accessory if you live near the woods in October or November in the states. I've found that hats are idea gifts, since I can pack them flat in a big envelope and I don't have to deal with a customs form. Practical and slightly lazy, which is just my style.

FO: Brattleboro Hat

Oh, it's time for the return of the masses of Paris! I've grown fond of having the city practically to myself in the cold dark winter, but, alas, it is not meant to be. The soundtrack of my life now consists of the daily parades of people awkwardly banging along with their wheely-suitcases dragging along the cobblestones. Alas, I live in a good Paris neighborhood with nary a tourist attraction within a kilometer, so it's only when I veture out of the neighborhood that I realize what a crazy lovely place Paris is to visit. And everyone does.

I can't hide, so I join them. A very chill Saturday, picnicking on the Trocadero. People watching and watching the tchotchke vendors occasionally getting chased across the plaza from a rather elderly cop that had no chance at all of catching them.

I also had a total freakout meltdown at how flithy my camera was. It wasn't the lens, but one of the internal mirrors somehow got coated in dust, but I didn't notice until I got home and loaded the pictures up. I suffer no more as I found a nice camera shop that humored my french and cleaned her up like new.

Yet another quick like a bunny, easy as pie hat.

This one is from the book, "New England Knits", which has a pretty good assortment of warm woolies that are slightly more fabulous than anything you could possibly purchase at LL Bean. Since it seems to be still winter-like almost everywhere that I have friends, I'm sure it will get some use.

The hat is made by starting a rib band until it fits around your head, then picking up stitches along the top and working in moss stitch before decreasing for the crown. The pattern calls for working buttons, but I couldn't be bothered and just sewed them into place.

Easy, cute, warm. Another good gift to send off. I love making hats for gifts because I can throw them in an envelope and ship them flat, which cost about half the price with international shipping being what it is.

FO: Snowtracks Hat

Another gift hat!

By the time La Poste gets around to delivering it, there probably won't be much need for such a warm hat, but eh. There's another winter coming up soon.

This one worked up quick-as-a-bunny with another skein of Cascade 220 Tweed. I'm trying to knit my stash down to scraps, and then make a striped hat out of all the scraps. One can dream, no?

It's simple, it's very warm, and a bit oversized for a friend who has a lot of hair to tuck under.

It's called the Snowtracks hat. That made me think of cocaine, so I made it in an un-pure purple color. I made the ribbing at the bottom extra long so you could fold it over to keep the ears extra warm. I found it very much to be a caricature of a winter-hat shaped hat.

FO: Utopia Hat

A quick, simple gift hat for a friend that's been pestering asking for one for quite some time.

It's the Utopia Cable hat. Quick, simple beanie with nice results. It's a free pattern (and written in the style that fee patterns tend to be) but it's not difficult. It's perfectly unisex to downright manly, depending on your color choice.

I love meandering cables. I used a skein of Cascade 220 tweed in a very dark coffee brown shade. I actually like the tweedy bits in this shade- no more rainbows, just subtle flecks of lighter colors.

Spring has not made itself so known that this won't get worn a couple times before it's put away.

FO: Chutes and Ladders Hat

A couple weeks ago it was sofrigginhot out and it felt as though winter has never existed anywhere ever. How could these waves of oven-like heat come from the same planetary weather system that did this to my car just a few months ago?



I spent the heat-wave week working from home in my little office with no air conditioning. That's how dire my work life has gotten- I would rather spend 8 hours in an airless sauna then make my way into the city with a crush of humanity to sit in a chilly icebox for the day. It actually ended up bring quite entertaining- just when I couldn't bear the heat another second, I would run into the kitchen and cook a big dinner. Corn on the cob, wonton soup, stewed chicken thighs over fresh pasta. Basically, standing in front of the oven and cooking made it so much easier to bear the oppressive heat and humidity because as soon as I stepped away, it magically felt 10 degrees colder. Also, because I couldn't drink water fast enough to stay hydrated, when I drank something with alcohol in it, i was tipsy and having a riotous good time right away. The fact that I spent several occasions over the winter dishing out huge amounts of cash to sit in a sauna or steam room, I had to embrace the heatwave as a way to cleanse my pores. My skin...it's fabulous.

It got so hot in the kitchen, a bottle of homemade beer exploded and shattered into a million pieces. I was kind of proud of the fact that I was tougher than the beer, but cleaning up all those sticky shards was not how I wanted to spend my morning.

The other thing I thought would make me feel nice and cool was to whip up some handspun hats. Oodles of them. As many as I could find odd balls of handspun in my stash. I've been spinning for, oh, 6 or 7 years now, which equates to a whole lot of 2-4oz skeins of oddballs of yarn. I'm on a lot of conference calls and webexes all day, and I find if I don't knit to keep my hands busy, I'll just start click-clicking away on the internet or tap-tapping away on the keyboard, answering emails and stressing about all the tasks that I could be doing. So I knit, and try to pay attention to the call. It's nice.

Here's the first one I spun up:



It started as a 2oz bump of Merino/Silk fiber from Capistrano Fiber Arts in the "Etoille" colorway. It was as soft as anything and the 20% silk content made this just a little shiny. I had acquired this at the Yarn Tree in Brooklyn ages ago...I actually bought two bumps and made a scarf out of the first one I spun up. I love the color on this so much- the combination of the moody dark purples and blues with yellow really made my heart pitter-pat.

I spun this up on my Kromski Minstrel into a big, bulky thick-and thin single.





I tried to keep it as lofty as possible. I had some thin spots where a whole lot of twist accumulated, but for the most part, I was happy with my non-lace spinning. It was fun, and making a bulky yarn takes a fraction of the time than cobweb lace. I got about 70 yards.

I found a hat pattern that I wanted to try.



It's called the Chutes and Ladders hat from the "Handspun Handknit" book. It's a perfect fun little hat to eat up a skein of handspun. It's just a ribbed brim, cables with double yarn overs that you drop on the next row. Or, at least that's how I did mine. The pattern had some ambiguous instructions, so I chose to ignore them and just knit on. It was probably just the heat messing with my head. I don't see any scary killer clown faces in this, so I think I'm okay.





It's not the most tidy hat, but I had a lot of fun making this. Also- it took maybe an hour and a half, and that was even with a good chunk of multi-tasking thrown in. I keep meaning to pick up some round balloons at the dollar store. I've been blocking hats over a mixing bowl for years and they all kind of have a flatter top that what I'd like.

Size 11 needles.

FO: Turn a Square

Oooh boy. I have lots of catching up to do. This has been a winter of constantly being sick, or in the process of getting sick. Those who know me well know that I never, ever, ever get as much as a sniffle most winters and plow right through whatever bug is going around. Not so much this winter. So there is a nice dose of Schadenfreude for you.

Let me tell you about my co-workers for a second (you know I don't like to mix my work life in with anything else, but it's good back story). I work in a sales department, which attracts the kind of people that are competitive in everything that they do, including gift-giving. I use this to my advantage as much as possible, especially around the holidays. If they want to assign their love for me with a cash value, I'm okay with this. If they want to put a little more thought into to get in my good graces and get me a nice fat gift certificate to an upscale yarn boutique, I wouldn't say no. They also tend to stock my personal bar with top-shelf goodness that will keep me warm and happy year-round.

So off to Purl Soho I marched on a bitter cold January day, with my freshly printed gift certificate in hand. It's a beautiful store with equally "beautiful people" clientele, all of them ready to drop a small fortune on a sweater's worth of cashmere. You have a rather unsettled feeling in that shop that the sheep that produce the wool for their yarn somehow produce no poo at all, and are a magic breed of sheep that have the ability to fly at night when no one is watching. It's priced accordingly.

I picked up a sweater's worth of thyme-green Merino and some Brooklyn Tweed Shelter, a new yarn that everyone has been buzzing about.



It's not particularly soft, but it's an interesting blend of Columbia and Tarhgee wools, which makes it very lofty and bouncy. It's rustically spun woolen-style, with lots of interesting neps spun in for texture and a heathered effect. Jared Flood has been blogging about the whole wool-into-yarn process on his blog recently. It's fascinating and I recommend checking it out.

I used some of the pretty brown color, Nest, to make a hat.



I choose the "Turn a Square" pattern, which, appropriately enough, is a Jared Flood pattern. I dug out a skein of Noro Silk Garden that was leftover from a coat I made a couple years ago to use as stripes. The results:





The stripes are very subtle. I love it. Best of all, this took me all of 3 days worth of commuting from start to finish.



He's already worn it a bunch, hence that slightly rumpled look. The requisite guy hat must be able to be crumpled down and shoved into a pocket, and it fits that need quite well. It's a good guy-beanie shape with the square top. It's cozy and warm and already looks like a favorite.



I did a jogless stripe technique to make the seam less visible. You can still see it though.

The best part is that this barely used half a skein of each, so there is definitely enough yarn leftover to make a second one. I did enjoy working with the Shelter. However, I found that when I tinked back to fix a mistake, the yarn would sometimes come unspun completely and break. It spit-splices really well, so it's not bad to fix. Just a bit troublesome that it does that.

The specs: I'm a super-loose knitter so I had to go down several needle sizes in order to get a hat that fit. I used US 3 needles for the ribbing and US 5 for the main part of the hat. I only used about 70 yards of the solid brown Shelter, and even less that with the Silk Garden, making this a great hat if you have scraps to use up. The pattern was well-written and simple.