Lilac hats

Next in our special on baby hats is a series inspired by a friend’s new baby named Lilac. So, obviously, this kid gets a baby hat from this lovely Jaggerspun Super Lamb yarn in the color-wait for it-Lilac! My mum came to visit us this summer, shortly before we moved, and I feel that part of the reason for her visit was so that she could go to the Jaggerspun factory store… she’s been dreaming of going there for years, ever since she first met their sock yarn and found out the store existed. So when the family was visiting us this summer (not just for yarn store visiting, especially since sister and dad don’t actually like going to yarn stores) my mom and I took a quick trip up to Maine and dropped by. I wasn’t planning on buying this yarn, but when I saw it I realized it was exactly the color we had been planning on making Lilac’s (the baby’s) hat from, so I had to get it. Along with a whole bunch of sock yarn. And weaving yarn. Because, well, it is a yarn store…

I’ve been enjoying playing around with using patterns of purl stitches to add interest, and that’s what I settled on for this series of hats (I couldn’t just buy the one skein, and then I had enough yarn for more than one hat, so what else was I to do?).

NIST baby hats

Speaking of baby hats, this summer my group at NIST had three babies, so I decided they all needed matching NISTy hats. Turns out that the NIST logo lends itself really well to duplicate stitch, though I don’t think that was one of the considerations they had when picking out that logo. For my purposes it was great though, because it made it really easy to knit a basic standard hat and then add on the NIST decoration after. I also appreciate that NIST’s colors are blue and white/grey, which I think is an excellent color scheme. My new institution is orange and black (go Tigers?), which I don’t think I will be wearing all that frequently.

Nerdy baby hat

So, when friends have babies, I typically try to determine if there’s a cool pattern that would mean something special to them that I could use, like the friends who got married at a strawberry u-pick got a strawberry hat, or my cousin who loves ladybugs got a ladybug hat.

This baby’s dad studies “the deformation response of polycrystalline structural alloys”. Apparently that involves modeling your solid with lots of hexagons in varying colors (except they’re called Voronoi tessellations).

So, I was informed that a cool hat would be one comprised of hexagons, using up all my different colored scraps. All well and good, until I realized how many ends that meant I would have to sew in. It was super fiddly, and I’m not fully convinced on how the attachment between hexagons worked out. I think that if I were to do it again I might just knit the hexagons flat and sew them all together after-I think that probably would have been easier than what I ended up doing!

I am very pleased with how it turned out though, and I’m glad I could do something involving his research for his baby’s hat. I made it out of knitpicks swish yarn, which I love for baby hats since it isn’t super expensive, it’s machine washable and it’s soft!

I’m still struggling with the best way to take pictures of hats, particularly kids ones. This time I tried a balloon, which sorta worked, but still isn’t ideal…

leftover hats, part 2

I had a partial skein of pink yarn left from the baby sweater/hat combo, and I didn’t really want to just stick it back in my stash. I also had the rest of the mohair glitzy yarn that I used in one of the previous leftover hats, so I decided to finish off both. Turned out I had enough of the pink for two hats, instead of one, but the glitz ran out after the brim on the first hat (which is what I expected). For the second hat I used some more of the blue sky baby alpaca yarn. It was heavier than the pink, but given that the textures are different for the different colors, I think it works well. It means that the hat is super soft!

Wool of the Andes hats... part 1

I say part 1, because I’m only halfway through this yarn… I bought enough for a super big cozy sweater, but when it arrived I decided it wasn’t quite what I wanted for the sweater I had in mind, so I started knitting hats out of it. We’re six hats and 500 grams in-exactly halfway. I’ve been enjoying making a series of hats that use the same number of stitches and the same yarn, and just seeing what different patterns I can come up with. Turns out that I can come up with ideas to try way faster than I can actually knit up the hats…

leftover hats

The one thing that these two hats have in common is that they used up some stash yarn. I noticed the blue yarn sitting on my desk one day-I have no recollection of selecting it from my stash, but there it was, sitting on my desk. I had used the rest of it for a cropped top lace sweater, and apparently had 50g left over. It’s Outlaw yarn’s bohemian sport: 45% Polwarth, 45% Alpaca, 10% Possum. It wasn’t the best choice for a sweater, as it felted like mad in the armpits, but it should be lovely for this hat. For the sake of variety I grabbed the white yarn to mix in-the white is some blue sky alpaca, and is a completely different weight. I’m actually fairly pleased with the result, particularly since I was making it up as I went, and I had no idea how far I’d get before I ran out of the blue…

This second hat is also from stash yarns, and used up the last of the sparkly pink yarn I used in a shawl about a year and a half ago. I’d used some of this pink for something before, but still had leftovers, so when I found a mohair silk laceweight in my stash that was a complementary color, I decided to use them together. While with the blue hat I started from the top and went until I ran out of yarn, I started this pink hat from the bottom, and actually ran out of yarn at the top, which is why it’s a slightly different color. I’ve decided it’s a design feature.

Cloudy with a chance of rainbows

I love that this colorway is called ‘cloudy with a chance of rainbows’. When you directly compare this color with the previous rainbow hats, these ones look a bit sad and dull, but on their own they are a lovely subdued rainbow. Both these rainbow hats and the previous bright ones are both from Knitpicks Felici.

I used this colorway to play with the zig-zag pattern I’d worked out with the previous rainbow yarn. Though the three adult sized hats may look the same, they vary in terms of the width of each stripe of color (done by using one, two or three skeins at once), and what type of increases I used. I had enough left over from the three adult hats to make two baby hats and finish off the leftovers.

These pictures were taken by putting the hats on my teapot! I am very pleased with my own ingenuity in figuring out that I could use my teapot as a head form, because I have been really struggling with taking hat pictures. For socks I have a foot model, and sweaters at least will lay flat on the ground, but hats…. They don’t lay flat unless I fold them, but then they look all long and impossibly narrow. If I lay them down and don’t try to force them flat, then I get all sorts of wrinkles and weird shadows. In theory I should be able to model them myself, and get pictures, but that requires availability of my photographer during daylight hours on a day that wants to cooperate (i.e. nice weather). Also, then they have to be able to fit my head. And my photographer is still learning the art of knitted object photography, so it typically takes 2-3 times longer than I feel like it should. (I don’t think he realized at the time that he was signing up to become my personal knitting photographer, so I can’t really complain, and I do try to take as many of my own pictures as possible…) So, if I am to continue with all of this hat knitting, I think I must go in search of a head model to join my foot model on the mantel.

Year of the Hats

I’m a sock knitter-it’s in the name of this blog, ‘Amy Knits Socks’, my instagram name ‘amyknitssocks’, and my ravelry name ‘amythesock’. I knit socks pretty much all the time. Except for this year. This year, apparently, is the year of the hats. So many hats. I think it’s because they’re super fast. I can use up my stash and whip out a new hat so quickly! I can try out patterns on them, and by the time I’m tired of the pattern, the hat is done! So prepare yourselves, my friends, for tons of hats. Lots of them. Currently I’m churning out hats at a rate of a few per week…

This post, we will look at the batch of hats I made from Knitpicks worsted Felci yarn in the colorway Rainbow. I love this color-it is super bright, cheery and loud. So loud. I love knitting things for other people, because I can use colors like these that I would never wear (i.e. any color other than blue). I find knitting with such happy colors makes me happy too. I purchased 400g (4 skeins) of this yarn just this past November, because it looked too fun not to play with. These are the result:

I started with a basic ribbed hat, to get a feel for the color repeat and such, before branching out into all sorts of other nonsense. I purchased this yarn because of it’s bright, cheerful rainbow colors, but I didn’t just want to knit plain ribbed hats, so I thought I’d try some patterns. My first try was the hat with floats, trying to see if I could add a bit of visual interest. I feel like the hat is still dominated by the stripes, though not as much as the cabled hat that I knit next. I think the cables get pretty lost in the colorful stripes, so I then tried to figure out what pattern would work with the colors, rather than against it. The lace diagonals was my first attempt. I really like how the top of it turned out-one of the things I strive for with hats is to make the top visually appealing, and I really like the star that shows up on the top of the lace hat, as well as the entrelac hat that I knit next. The last pattern I tried was the zig-zag hat, and I’m really pleased with how the colors make the pattern. The zig zags and the entrelac hats are my favorite, because the colorway works so well with those patterns.

o Tannenbaum hat

I put my mitten pattern up on yarnpond to look for test knitters, and I was overwhelmed by the response. Within 2 days I’d had 16 knitters offer to test knit, not including my mom. She’s currently finished four pairs of the mittens, each slightly different. It was while she was wearing her new mittens that she decided there should be a hat pattern to go with them. When Mommy tells me I need to write a hat pattern, I sit down and do it!

Conceptual design for the hat

I started by jotting down instructions on a piece of paper, complete with this picture that I am inordinately proud of. Mum had sport weight yarn in the appropriate colors, while I had worsted. I decided to write the pattern up for both. With worsted weight I can keep the same 8 stitch pattern decrease that I used on the full mittens, while a sport weight adult hat requires slower decreases. By the time we both cast on our respective samples, the pattern was already all typed up, with this drawing and a picture of my fingerless mittens as placeholders.

I made the large child size, which I think may be a bit small for me, even though I do have a smaller head. It was a quick knit, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out-particularly how the decreases look from above. I’m still working on training up my photographer, so I don’t have the best pictures ever, and we will need to iterate a bit more to get the pattern pictures… I tried showing him exactly the style of picture we were aiming for, that my mum took of me in a different hat, and while that helped get a good angle of the hat, we apparently weren’t super picky about making sure the background looked good. I’m really considering getting a head model, to put on the mantelpiece next to my foot model.

My plan is to look for test knitters for this one as soon as mom finishes (and photographs) her second hat, which she’s making to be her size. Then I’ll have a matching set of sock, mitten and hat patterns!

baby sweater

With two friends due in March (on the 13th and 31st, coincidentally), I decided it was time for some baby knitting. My mom’s favorite baby sweater pattern is the shawl collared aran sweater pattern by Debbie Bliss in her 1988 book ‘Baby Knits’. Since it’s mum’s favorite pattern, I figured I’d give it a try. As we already knew, I’m not all that good at knitting a pattern straight, so there were significant changes, starting with knitting it in the round. Also, no bobbles. I do not like knitting bobbles. At all. So the front cable was modified accordingly. And some of the other cables were modified, by mistake more than intention… Also, I went with a seed stitch ground for under the arms and the sides.

Other than those modifications (and the detail of not knitting a gauge swatch, so I’m not quite sure if the sweater is the appropriate width), I more or less followed the pattern. I did follow the number of stitches, which was one of the key reasons for referring to a pattern in the first place. I was told I should knit a hat to go with, since I had plenty of extra yarn. I wanted something fairly simple, since I was knitting this while doing other things, so I decided not to use all of the cables from the sweater, but just do some basic 4 stitch cables.

The yarn is a sport weight in a colorway called ‘coral reef’ from Rocking the wool-from the yarnbox page on this yarn: “Megan from Rocking the Wool is an artisan hand dyer out of the Chicago area. Using 100% Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTs) certified organic merino wool, each skein is dyed using low impact dyes that are heavy metal-free acid and environmentally friendly. What’s so special about the GOTs certification? It means that, from start to finish, you have a yarn that is environmentally conscious. This is the best organic textile standard that you’ll find in the world. This link will bring you to a great break down of all the environmental criteria a yarn must adhere to receive a GOTs certification.” Given that the care instructions are to hand wash cool, it might have not been the best choice for a baby sweater, but I thought the color was perfect. I really struggled with getting the right color in these pictures. It’s pink, but not a super in-your-face pink like the first picture implies, and not orange as so many of the pictures I took while it was in progress turned out. It was really frustrating. I tried in all sorts of lighting, and I did try messing with filters to make it better, but I failed. So you’ll just have to imagine it in a nice soft pink color.