In Real Life

 Iris asked to see the pin loom triangle hat in real life, so here it is from this morning:

We were heading to Aldi to do our weekly shop, thus the mask. And I am experiencing my usual summer poor sleep and other crud, thus the numerous layers of bags underneath my eyes! In real life for sure!

I hope it's a nice day in your part of the world.

Share

Triangle to Square to Circle the Head

 I recently finished weaving enough triangles on my pin loom to create a hat, which I love. My triangular pin loom has the pins closer together than my square or heart, so fingering/sock yarn is perfect. I love the way the sock yarn weaves up on this loom, although sometimes with yarns that have longer colour changes, the triangles are just a single colour. It's fun to see how each yarn behaves on the loom. 

I finish all my pin loom weaving pieces by crocheting a slip stitch border around the edge. I like this better than just leaving the loops as they are when they come off the loom--it adds a nice frame and it gives a sturdier edge for connecting pieces. In this case, I decided to add another crochet border with dark blue laceweight yarn, which made the colours pop.

To start, I put four triangles together to form a square, which became the crown of the hat.

Then I added triangles along each edge, point side down. The next round was triangles in the corner spaces, points towards the corners. Then two more rounds like that, before a couple rounds of crochet at the brim.

Since it's all sock yarn, which is superwash, laundering will not shrink the triangles, but the dark blue is plain wool, so I did toss the hat in the wash just to firm that part up a bit. It's a slouchy sort of hat, but not a huge slouch. It's lightweight, colourfully funky, and comfortable to wear. I had lots of fun making it. I do love my pin looms!

Share

Pin Loom Hat from Noro Wool

 Last December, a friend sent me a box of yarn that she'd bought about a decade ago, thinking she might learn to knit or crochet. I did teach her to crochet years ago, but somehow, she did not become obsessed with yarn. This is difficult for me to understand 😉😃, but we can't all be in love with the same things. She has her own creative interests. She was tired of having the yarn in her house, so sent it on its way across a continent and an ocean, arriving just a couple of days before we came here to look at this apartment. It was packed again in short order and when I unpacked it again, I added it to the rest of the yarn collection. The box contained a mix of yarns--novelty ribbon and eyelash yarns, as well as some wool and blends of wool, mohair, and other fibres. There was a ball of Noro wool in there. Noro is known for the colours of the various yarns, mostly with long colour changes and lots of colour in a ball (although there are more muted colourways). It is gorgeous yarn and this ball was in my kind of colours--cool jewel tones. I thought when I first saw it that I would make a hat out of it, but wasn't sure how I would do it. I knew from past experience that both knitting and crocheting would require the use of some scraps with the ball of Noro to eke out a hat. I let it sit in the collection and let the ideas percolate. Then Bill got me a pin loom and I started playing with that. It seemed perfect for the Noro wool. I thought weaving would be a great way to allow the colours to shine and it would allow me to get more mileage from the yarn, as the weaving uses less than knitting or crochet. I wasn't sure how many squares I would get from the ball, but decided to just start making squares, see how many I ended up with, and take it from there. I ended up with 13 squares and I might have enough left for one more (I kept some yarn back in case I needed it to sew up or crochet a border or something). 

I needed to put a bit of a border on each square, just to get the circumference right, so I rummaged round and came up with some scrap balls of some very dark blue laceweight yarn I'd gotten a few years ago at a charity shop, which I doubled up. I experimented with crochet stitches of different heights, measuring after each and doing some calculations before going with one round of double crochet, which was perfect. I like the effect of the dark frame around each square, which makes the colours pop even more. 

I left long tails when starting and ending the border rounds, and I used those to sew the squares together, which I did in the order in which the yarn came off the ball. I sewed 5 together into a tube and then sewed 5 more to each other and the first set. I didn't need any more height and considered cinching the top together by weaving some yarn through and pulling closed but I decided to crochet around the top, decreasing quickly, instead. Finally, I crocheted around the bottom using single crochet, chain one around. This pulled the bottom in just the right amount. I don't want my hats to be really tight, but if they're too loose, they slide around and are not very useful in wind. 

So that's my hat--all squares from the same ball of yarn. The colours take my breath away--I just love them. I'm looking forward to cooler weather when I can wear it. It's a lightweight hat, so good for chilly days that are not too cold. We wear hats all the time, so we each have a collection of hats and something to suit whatever conditions arise!

And now, I'm off to make a cup of tea and to cut a couple of pieces from the loaf of wholemeal raisin bread that is fresh out of the bread maker.It smells so good in here at the moment--it's a rainy, windy day as Storm Francis moves through, so the smell of freshly baked bread seems like a perfect.accompaniment to my kind of day 🍞😋

I hope you are well and staying safe!

Share

It Wanted to Be a Hat

Several weeks ago, when we were in Buncrana, we stopped in at a little shop that sells various stitching supplies--threads, fabric, yarn, tools, and a bunch of other stuff. I bought some forest green crochet thread there. I also had to rummage around in the single skein clearance box (of course!), which contained lots of yarns in many different textures and colours. I did not see any two alike, but I found a couple skeins to bring home with me. One of the skeins told me right away that it wanted to be a warm and fuzzy hat. It was a skein of something called 'winter cotton'--a blend of cotton and acrylic with a fuzzy halo. Ten days ago it was getting impatient and telling me that the time was right  to cast on for the simple roll brim hat I'd decided on. I worked on it a little bit each day for 2 or 3 days and I finished it last Saturday.

Because the yarn has so much going on and I did not have that much of it, I kept things extremely simple.

Using a 6.5 mm circular needle, I cast on 72 stitches, joined, placed a stitch marker, and just knit around and around. I kept checking to see how much yarn I had left and decided to add the stripe using a bit of navy blue wool from the scrap stash. I did 5 rounds with the blue and carried on with the winter cotton--I did not cut it and rejoin it after the stripe, but just carried it up inside. I knit until the piece was the same height as the space between where my wrist meets my hand to the tip of my middle finger. In her book, Knitting Rules, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (who blogs as The Yarn Harlot) gives this as a rule of thumb for hat heights from brim to the start of the crown decreases. I made sure to keep the natural curl at the bottom, since that is how it will be worn. Had I stretched that out, my measurement would have been off.

Then I began my crown decreases by alternating decrease rounds and knit even rounds as follows:
Round 1: (knit 10, k2tog) around
Round 2 and all even rounds: knit even
Round 3: (knit 9, k2tog) around
Round 5: (knit 8, k2tog) around
Round 7: (knit 7, k2tog) around
Round 9: (knit 6, k2tog) around
Round 11: (knit 5, k2tog) around
Round 13: (knit 4, k2tog) around
Round 15: (knit 3, k2tog) around
Round 17: (knit 2, k2tog) around
Round 19: (knit 1, k2tog) around
Round 21: (k2tog) around

When there are no longer enough stitches to go around the circulars, I switch to double pointed needles and continue.  This means a decrease of 6 stitches in each decrease round, which creates a more gentle slope at the top of the hat--it is a beanie shape. If I'd wanted a different sort of transition/crown, I could have knit around for more rounds before starting to decrease--this would have made the crown itself smaller, with more decreases in each round. For example, I could have started my decreases in what is round 7 above. This would give me 8 decreases in each round. Or to decrease very quickly, I could start with what it round 13. These quicker decreases make a flatter crown, as in these hats:

 I opted for the slower decreases because I wanted to make sure I had enough yarn, and more decreases means fewer stitches to knit and less yarn used. I ended up having enough, with a small ball left to go into the scrap stash. I probably could have gotten away with making the whole hat in the winter cotton if I had cast on fewer stitches to start, but as it happens, I like the navy blue stripe, so I am glad it's in there. All's well that ends well!

Share