Intarsia and the eggplant hat

A friend has asked me to make her an eggplant hat, like one her favorite childhood teddybear wore. :o)

Having someone else expect a finished product makes me stay on the ball and get things done in a reasonable amount of time, so here we go.

The picture up top is what she found for me to work from. I found a soft acrylic yarn in a great deep plum color - I'm going to have to get some more and make myself something with it. So far, I've gotten about 4 inches completed.

I spent a little time this weekend playing with intarsia, since I've never tried it and will need to use it to work in the leaves at the top of the hat. I plotted a pattern and worked this little guy up:

Fun! I pulled the main color a bit too tight when I picked it back up at the end of the rows, so the swatch ended up being a little puffy instead of laying flat. I'll need to keep that in mind in the future.

I still need to figure out how to make the twisted stem at the top of the hat - maybe some combination of i-cord and ruffling? I guess that's something else to play with when I get to that point.

Ta-da!

So, this is the little hat that rekindled my interest in knitting. I shall call it the Whoopsie-Daisy hat.

I actually started it several months ago, just trying to make a plain, quick hat for myself. Obviously, I did a rotten job of guessing how big it should be, and after completing a couple of inches, I put it away.

A few weeks ago, I was flipping through a knitting magazine my mom had passed on to me, and I found the pattern for a baby hat, thought it was cute, and figured I'd give it a go. (I've found that the pattern is originally from Itty Bitty Hats.) The bulk of the hat is a plain, cheap acrylic yarn - Red Heart's "Super Saver" - that comes in those massive skeins. Not the greatest stuff, obviously, but easy to work with and good to use while I'm learning. The petals are another cheap, but much softer acrylic by Caron. I found this yarn to be a nightmare to work with. It seemed a good bit thinner than the worsted weight it claimed to be, and the individual plys untwisted and separated very easily, making it all too easy to split the yarn if I wasn't paying close attention. I guess you get what you pay for.

I liked the color, though, and the fact that the petals are softer and have a bit of a sheen.

The pattern instructs you to sew the finished petals all the way around, but as I was pinning them in place, I really liked how the edges curled up, so I left them free. It makes it look a bit more like you really did just plop a flower down on top of a baby's head.

Welcome to my bloggy blog

Hey there. How ya' doin'?
Good, good. Me? I'm fine, just obsessed with knitting a bit lately.
I started in late 2002 with a "I Taught Myself to Knit!" kit, and to date, I've finished 3 projects. If you're keeping score at home, that works out to about half an item a year.I just finished my first "real" project, and while I'm still ridiculously proud of the little thing I've made, I hope to use this blog to track my projects and keep the momentum going.