More Knitted Hats.

I have regrettably been out of the blogging loop for some time now and have a ton of projects to get posted in the next few weeks to catch up with all of our crafting. These pics are from last winter. I swear I remember working on these just after Thanksgiving, so these are ridiculously old, but never posted as far as I can tell.

So, let the catching up begin!

I love knitting hats. They're relatively quick and the pattern possibilities are endless.

The hat with all of the "bobbles" was gifted to Angela. It was a great pattern and seemed perfect for her. The sizing didn't turn out right because I'm sure I was lazy with the swatch, but whatever the reason, it was much too big. We ended up seaming it up along the back, sewing a section out to make it fit better, then just cut out the excess knitted fabric. That tactic worked surprisingly well, but I will know next time to be more vigilant with the swatching. This pattern was from a magazine, so I don't have a pattern to link. I'm sure I could find the mag if anyone wants the pattern.

It's funny that with a standard hat pattern, I've gotten fairly good at testing the size as I go and knitting without a pattern. There are standard diameters to reference for hat sizes, so a normal pattern is easy to adjust for a good fit. I knitted this cabled hat for myself and intentionally went for a loose fit, but once again was a little off with the size and it's a bit larger than desired. I still love it, though - LOVE the yarn and the colors, and it was my first time to work with full-fledged cables. The hat I knitted for my step-dad (also last winter) was a pattern with a play on cables in a nice green cotton yarn - kinda mini-cables, but only in one direction, so more like ripples than cables. I apologize that I don't have this pattern either, but for this one, I just googled for a cable hat pattern, then adjusted it as needed to get the rim and top look I wanted.

For hats, it's just a little math to get the stitch counts to work out for the size you want - for example, if the rows are multiples of 9, plus 3, round up or down based on the number of stitches needed to make the diameter - based on the test swatch that tells you how many stitches you will knit per inch. So, if you have 4 stitches per inch (from the swatch), and want a 20" hat in diameter (at the ears), you want around 80 stitches, so you could either choose to start a little on the smaller size and have the stitch pattern repeated 8 times to start (9*8+3 = 75) or could round up to repeat 9 times (9*9+3 = 84). Then, for most of the hat patterns you'll see a series of decreases once the hat is knitted straight up from the ears to the crown of the head - really you will learn to decrease as aggressively as you want to suit your own personal preference (more baggy or more fitted look), but you basically do a series of decreases every other row until you get to a minimum number of stitches - usually in the neighborhood of 8 - then, draw the yarn through all the remaining stiches into the hat, turn hat inside out to finish, cinch the opening closed, knot, and weave in all the ends. For cables, there's one more layer of complexity, since it looks much nicer to gradually reduce the size of the overall cables, decreasing the number of stitches involved in the cable over a certain number of rows. By the end, for a full cable with both left and right leaning twists, you'll only want one stitch twisted on each side (this is at the very top).

Anyway, noone necessarily wants to know all that, but if you'd like to get into designing your own hats, that's the basic formula - no formal pattern needed! :)

Up next - crafting from spring '09.