Turns out I needed those leftovers from Medusa to make this hat complete.
I am trying to work smart on this one. I counted the number of rows from the end of the increases to the start of the burgundy. I will then work that same number of rows on the opposite end before starting the decreases. Hopefully this means I will have a hat that folds where I want it to.
Double thick worsted weight is going to make one warm hat. I just hope that I have enough yarn to finish…..
After many many worsted weight hats, this sport weight hat seems like it takes forever! But my SSK Tweed Hat has reached the main hat body.
I’m using US 5 needles and for this gauge, 112 stitches. I really had zero interest in ribbing that many stitches so I worked in stockinette. It might be the same thing over and over again but I find it soothing. And I still have a bag full of yarn that wants to be more hats!
Side note, I asked my son to bring me my purse. He replied, “which one? Your regular purse or your knitting purse?”. I kinda love that he thinks my knitting bag is another purse!
The pink is Malabrigo, the variegated is Potion Yarns and now the burgundy is Malabrigo again. I will need all of this burgundy and probably a wee bit of something else to top this off. I need to measure a finished hat to determine the height I need. I think I’ll put a stitch marker at “half” so I can do some easy maths and measuring.
I made myself adult and I did finish my Medusa Hat!
Pattern: My Own basic beanie “recipe” with 88 sts
Needles: US 8s
Yarn: Malabrio Rios in Medusa
This hat used 71 grams of the 100 gram skein. This probably means that I could have made the hat body longer based on my prior hats. When I tried this on, it was a fitted beanie with zero slouch. Which is fine and just means the recipients are more limited. And the silver lining is that I will have plenty of leftovers to finish my Frankenstein hat, lol.
It’s scorching summer here and we are winding down with swimming lessons for Jellybean. He’s in level 4 and crushing it. Meanwhile I am sweating through my business casual in the slim areas of shade. That water was way to tempting.
It’s been good for my Medusa Hat. I am through the body of this hat and put the DPNs in to start the decreases. I love love love these blips of color in this variegation. The fabric just looks so polished and purposeful.
We still have several lessons to do so I envision this hat coming off the needles this week. Happy Knitting!!
It’s officially back to school season and activities are flying fast around here. So much so that I blew through the folded brim and into the stockinette of my Medusa Hat.
The speckles in this yarn are EVERYTHING that I love right now. Those little flecks I think add some much interest to vanilla hat. I need another 3 inches of hat and then I can start decreases.
My conundrum is for my next hat do I start working on scrappy hats with leftovers or do I wind up some of the worsted yarn I got at SSK? I am still finding my mojo drifting to worsted weight hats as they are quick satisfying and do not require any mental bandwidth.
The SSK retreat has this cool benefit that for a small donation or tip, they will wind yarn for you with some fancy equipment. I had a skein of what I thought was worsted in my knitting bag and I put into be wound.
When I got it back, I realized it was in fact NOT worsted and actually a sport weight from Red Door Fibers that I picked up from KITH KC 2024. I decided to roll with it. But that meant stopping and doing some calculations to adjust stitch count and needle size for this weight of yarn.
After some maths, I landed on 112 stitches on US 5s. Still thinking a stockinette folded brim followed by a vanilla beanie style. This hat is going decidedly slower with the smaller yarn and more stitches. I think this will migrate to being my work backpack knitting and therefore a slow and stead progress kind of project?
I have another skein of sport wound up in cake that needs knit up. So if this works, I will get that skein into my project queue.
I finished my English Rose hat in my third and final class for SSK. This class was Bums and Bellies again by Kim McBrien Evans.
I had made some progress in sit and knit groups but the decreases were finished in the class. This had landed in that 75 gram weight so I used 3/4 of the skein. I did notice a unique feature of this skein was a line of dark pink that circled the hat in a spiral. I am now at hat seven so I am close to my gift goal.
The class was very good. I was able to get help with some tricky measurements and get some tips on how to change my sweaters to fit my silhouette. It will require a lot of math on my part and we didn’t get into that depth in the class. So there is homework I need to do but my brain was too full of information get that done in the moment.
On day two of SSK, I took a morning class on understanding sleeves and sleeve fit from Kim McBrien Evans of Indigo Dragonfly fame.
I had a hat in my bag and being the south….a super crispy cold coca cola. In preparation for the conference, I pulled another skein of malabrigo from my purchase last month and got another stockinette hat on the needles. This one is going to be called the English Rose hat as that is what the colorway is called.
I managed to get the brim finished, turned and started on the hat by the time class was done. I learned a ton about all kinds of sleeves and came out with some measurements and tweaks that I need for my next sweater.
Pattern: My own 88 sts “recipe” for a basic knit beanie with folded brim
Needles: US 8s
Yarn: Malabrigo Rios in the Hojas colorway
I used 80 grams of the skein and therefore eyeballed myself into using 5 more grams than the last hat. I really should never trust my eyes, lol. In the light of day you can really see the variation in this Malabrigo. I think it adds character!
Now back to the hat knitting and next week I will share some of my favorite parts of the SSK Retreat!