I’m once again catching up with finished projects. With a recent, much-needed upgrade of my computer to Windows 7 (Goodbye Vista! Won’t miss ya!), I’m hoping to update more frequently. To start out with, the oh-so-fun hats for my nephews and niece:
and with a little help from Chris Moose:
These hats, once I got over my unfortunate rookie mistake of misreading the needle requirements, were very quick and easy. To give the chainmail portion a bit of sparkle, but to keep it soft, I held together two yarns: Lion Brand Vanna’s Glamour (which has a silvery, sparkly strand woven in), and Caron Simply Soft. The i-cord crowns were an addition, to individualize the hats with I. and J.’s favorite colors and to help keep them separate but equal. I didn’t necessarily know what I was doing with the crown shaping at the beginning, and I started off just trying to make sure I had plenty of i-cord to work with (long enough to wrap around the hat twice, plus a little bit). Then I played around with pins for a bit:
The pins got to be a bit of a pain, quite literally, so I ended up eyeballing it. The main trick was keeping a consistent number of rows and stitches in the crenellations, and sewing enough of the key points on to keep it mostly kid-roughhousing proof.
For the little siblings were corresponding prince and princess hats, made with some of my favorite cotton yarn (at least for softness): Hobby Lobby’s I Love This Cotton.
To make this similarly separate but equal, both hats use the Princess Crown pattern. For the more masculine version (i.e., no picot edge on the hat band), these mods were done:
rounds 4-5 knit
round 6 purl
rounds 7-8 knit
round 9 purl
rounds 10-14 were knit
All four hats were complete successes. I.’s face, when he first opened his book and hat, was priceless! We ended up having a small regiment running around the house for a while, and some persuasion had to be employed to get a few family pictures without the hats. : )
Up next: a fun crafty exchange gift, another belated Christmas FO, and getting my first knitting commissions!
