Hats Off To My Partner

I am lucky enough to be with someone who is endlessly supportive of the odd and lovely life I love to live (excuse the alliteration, I get excited).  He is kind enough to spend hours upon hours of his personal time editing my blog posts to make sure that I sound coherent, he listens as I ramble to no end about all of the things I want to create and all of the alpacas I want to snuggle, and he's part of what makes my crafterlife so sweet, so obviously he's going to have a plethora of knitted and quilted things that serve as my wee crafty heart’s expression of love and appreciation;

This one happens to be a hat.

He picked out his own yarn, and I snagged the dark grey from my stash because I went through all of the careful deliberation of making a pattern only to realise I would need 4 different colours as opposed to 3.  Lucky for me, the grey was a welcomed addition.  

When first attempting the fairisle for this hat, I tried the method of having separate bundles of the colour I was working with in the back so that each section would have its own ball.  I was hoping that by doing this that I would prevent any undesired bunching or tightness from running the secondary colour (blue) behind the primary (purple).  I found that I had a hard time not relaxing my hands enough on my fingerless gloves, and wanted to steer clear of that same mistake.

That being said, after getting most of the way through the trees with the separate balls method, the work actually became more messy and ended up with disastrously bad tension so the secondary stitches would either be completely invisible or loose and sloppy looking.  To solve this I ripped it all back and ran the blue behind each purple stitch like I did with my hooded scarf. 

It was exactly what I needed to do.  The pattern stayed crisp this way, and running the secondary colour behind each stitch kept it from getting too tight and losing the flexibility it had.  

Running two colours behind the primary colour was a little more challenging but still worked out, and ultimately kept the pattern bright and clear as I finished up the last of the multi-strand work.  

I did however run into some speckling from where the 2 secondary colours were poking through which I fixed by taking a darning needle, and some of my leftover purple yarn, and looping around each speckled spot to pull it back and give the room in between the stitches a purple base.

By the time I had finished the pattern, I was worried the hat was a little too long to be practical, so I tried a couple of decreasing techniques to cast off more quickly, e.g. decrease by two stitches as six set points, decrease by many fixed points, and adding decreasing points after having already set fixed points to decrease from.  These all ended up making too drastic of a change, and made the top of the hat lumpy and sad.  After the third time ripping it back, I made peace with it being a more elongated hat, only to find out that the length made it the perfect size -- go figure.

So at last it's finished, and I've finally knitted something for my partner to help keep him warm in the chilly months we still face, and hopefully for many more years to come.

Thanks for reading.

Stay sweet, stay crafty, and stay tuned.