How I survived the Curse of the Unending Hat
Well, obviously I am not a dedicated blogger which is funny because I get impatient for a new entry in the blogs I read if a week goes by without one. My knitting has increased in one sense -- I am knitting hats and vests for a great charity, Warm Woolies -- and slowed in another sense -- I'm trying to stop doing as much knitting for individuals because I find it rather stressful, at least if they know about it.
A case in point; I have been trying to make the half-dome hat for a friend who requested a kufi-style hat (moslem prayer hat) and it turned into the CURSED hat. You knit the majority of the hat on number 5 needles but the brim is knitted with 3s! I started with addi turbos which I have liked on other projects but they were a nightmare on this one. I made more errors in the first three rounds than I had for all my previous projects put together. Small needles are hard enough for me but small slippery needles? And to get gauge I should have gone down a size but that wasn't going to happen. So I frogged it, got some bamboo needles and started again.
One thing I hate about small needles is I find the small stitches hard to see (and this was in a dark slate blue) so I end up dropping or mistakenly adding stitches and not discovering the problem until several rounds later. I frogged the middle section of the hat a half a dozen times. I also hate how long everything seems to take with small needles. And my friend had a much larger than usual head (he wears a size 8 fedora -- I have a big head and I wear a 7 3/4 hat so we're talking a long circumference to knit around.
Then the decreases added a fresh level of hell. Not the decreases themselves but more needle issues. I switched to two circulars and had one of my Denise needles separate and drop a boatload of stitches. I love my Denise needles and they had never come undone like that before. But this was the CURSED hat. So I laboriously picked up the stitches and started using dpns (look at these great colors). They fell (were pushed?) out. So I put the hat aside and my friend pretty much gave up.
Then I saw the Knitty sweater pattern Thermal and I loved the waffle stitch. She described it as stretchy so I thought it would make an excellent hat. I decided to make my own pattern using the waffle stitch but I couldn't bear to unravel the hat and use the same yarn, what if the curse came with it? I bought a new ball of what I thought was the same slate blue color and cast-on a narrow brim with silver gray (from the CH but it hadn't actually been knit so I thought it would be safe) and started away.
It went very fast at first and was enjoyable (size 6 needles - yeah!) but then I got to the decreases and realized that I had cast on too many stitches for the decreases I wanted to do (but what was needed for the stitch pattern and his size) so I had to do a lot of thinking and decided to decrease 5 stitches in the non-ribbing section of the waffle stitch and then I'd be fine. But I wasn't. I had thought to do the waffle stitch on the entire hat and because I was doing double decreases it should reduce in each section by one rib pair. But I somehow added a stitch or forgot to do one of the decreases and couldn't figure out what I should do so I put it aside again. Then I was reading AlterKnit and she had a beautiful silk kufi style hat that changed to stockinette stitch at the decreases and there were 5 paired decreases which looked cool. Aha! I started doing the same and it looked great but then I started to panic a bit because I was getting close to the end of the skein. No problem, I'll just use a teeny bit of the cursed skein, right? Oh no, different blues entirely. Thankfully I eked out the yarn and finished the hat 6 months after I started. And here, modeled by me is the no-longer-cursed hat (And my friend liked it):
Other recent projects (I love that you can see the snow falling in the earflap shot:
And projects for the Charmed Knits Knitalong: A Ravenclaw beret is on the needles (using the cursed yarn but the curse appears to have been broken) and Gryffindor and Slytherin waiting in the wings. I don't have a yellow wool so Hufflepuff will just have to wait.
