Wednesday, October 31, 2007

halloween parade

In honor of the song that titles this post, my mother offered to pose with her birthday hat next to my Strange Light poster. I was not super happy with the hat (made up the pattern, used Wool in the Woods Cyclone) but she claimed to not mind it. I thought the matching mittens were better. One cool thing about the hat was that doing a simple decrease on the knit rows of in-the-round garter stitch made a star-like shape appear on the top. Well, sort of...

3 comments:

CH said...

Well done, Chubb! The star-like shape on the top of the hat is pretty fabulous - an especially impressive feat given the made up pattern.
Are there any pictures of the matching mittens?

Elizabeth said...

Star patterned hat!! (I'm also very swoony over the pretty poster in its pretty frame.)

Ok, so I must confess: I could really use a hat tutorial. I made one, and it's not bad, but I tried to make one without a pattern once and it was a total disaster. Like mittens, there must be some kind of basic hat structure that all other hats build off of, no?

HEB said...

Here's (roughly) how I made the hat:

Size 8 needles
CO 77 stitches onto 4 double pointed needles
Knit garter stitch for 10 rows (when knitting in the round, that's one row purl, one row knit).
Now you can knit in stockinette, or do what I did on this hat and use some stockinette and some garter stitch until the hat measures about 6 inches. (I had my mother try it on to make sure that it would cover her ears. There's nothing wrong with making it a little longer, because then you can fold up the brim.)

Begin decrease:
Row 1: Repeat [Knit 5, k2tog] for whole row
Row 2 (and all even rows) : Knit all (or purl all, for my version of hat)
Row 3: Repeat [Knit 4, k2tog] for whole row
Row 5: Repeat [Knit 3, k2tog] for whole row
Row 7: Repeat [Knit 2, k2tog] for whole row
Row 9: Repeat [Knit 1, k2tog] for whole row
Row 11: Repeat [K2tog] for whole row.

Cut your yarn (leaving about a 12 inch tail). Put the tail on a yarn needle. Thread the tail through the remaining stitches and pull tight. Sew in the end.

Unfortunately, no pictures of the mittens. Maybe I'll snag some pictures of the full hat-and-mitten set over Thanksgiving.