Double secret no more

I finally finished Megan’s hat! By my calculations, this is the first object I have finished since November. Note to self: finish shit more often. It feels good.

I had some trouble with this one. I have trouble with hat sizing in general, blessed as I am with a head that could be charitably described as "on the large side." So when I try to knit hats for other people, I shoot vaguely for a “too small for me” size. Turns out “too small for me” includes everything from a regular men’s or women’s size hat to a hat suitable for a child of 8 or 9 years.

Guess which size hat I knit – in its entirety – the first time? Yeah, I knit the whole wee hat, then frogged it back to the brim.

When I finally reknit it in a more grown-up circumference, the hat was about 2 inches too long. So I ripped out half of it and started the decreases earlier. Since I’ve now knit this hat 2.5 times, I really feel like it should be a whole lot fancier.

But here it is in all its tweedy simplicity.



Thankfully, I did find a perfect button at the Bazaar Bizarre to gussy it up a little bit. Mmmm, sparkly.



Pattern: Inspired by a hat in Rowan 38, but actual pattern made up to suit my yarn, budget and desire not to seam things.

Yarn: Queensland Kathmandu DK, about 1.5 balls, held doubled, though hard to tell, as I ripped and reknit so many times that I mostly have scraps and tiny balls leftover. Heh. Tiny balls. Heh.

Needles: Blue ones? Maybe red ones.

Thoughts: next time, I will knit something from a pattern when I want to give Christmas gifts in a timely fashion. If I reknit something similar, I would also slip the first stitch on every other row to make picking up stitches around the brim strip a bit tidier.

Because I’m a blogger (and not a very good friend), I made Megan try on the hat on Tuesday, but she won’t actually get it until tomorrow. So I could take pictures of it in decent lighting today.

The very spirit of generosity, I am.