From the Studio: Designing Hats

Serendipity has been my first adventure into knitting hats, so I thought I would write a little bit about how it came about. I have to say that this has been one of the most satisfying things I have ever designed. I like to knit what I design more then once, to perfect on it and tweak it. I was able to knit 3 of these chunky monkeys in just 2 days, in my spare moments. It’s an amazingly fast knit in that chunky yarn.

Ah yes, the yarn. Lets talk about the yarn. It’s made from Spud & Chloe’s “Outer” which is a wonderful blend of superwash wool (65%) and organic cotton (35%). That is the perfectly, washable combination for a busy mom, and hats get dirty pretty quick so I think it’s really nice to have it be machine washable. I had been lucky enough to receive a preview of all the new colors (coming out this month!) and had been looking at them for a few weeks.

I had some other yarn but the Outer kept calling my name, plus the Sunkissed color was so amazingly sweet. I loved just how the yarn looked, I love how soft and bulky it is. It literally was calling out to me to be made into a chunky hat. Wasn’t there a famous sculpture artist who said the shape was already in the stone, he just carved away the extra bits? It felt like that. I just knew what that yarn wanted to be knit up into.

The fun thing about hats is, they are so small it’s super easy to rip or tink if you need to, it’s not as daunting. With two little ones around me all the time, it doesn’t take much to feel like too much. I cast on and knit a few rows, but realized I didn’t like it starting with a knit row, rip and started over with a purl row first. Got to the stockinette portion and started my decreases too soon, tinked back and re-worked it. I also somehow twisted my rounds a few times because I was knitting on a 40″ magic loop, and its way easier to get twisted then on a 12″ or so circular. I ripped and tinked a bunch of times and still finished the hat in a few hours. Then I knit another in a larger size. I accidently knit the ear flaps too close to the front of the head, easy solution, just turn the hat around back to front and it covers the ears perfectly. I adjusted the pattern to be correct. I’ve knit 3 now (still need to get better photos of #3) and I’ve never knit something that felt so useful.

I have some baby hats for LG but she hates them, wiggles her head around to get free of them. Babies just seem to need knit hats, they fit better. I have no idea why. Maybe someone out there reading this knows the science behind it, I only know the art. LG doesn’t mind wearing hers at all!

The great thing about the Toddler version of the hat is, even though it calls for 2 skeins of yarn, you only use a few yards of the second skein, so if you change colors in the hat like in the version pictured here, you can get two full hats out of the two skeins. If you just knit it in one color, I think you could have enough in the second skien to knit a newborn or baby version, so you could get two out of two skeins that way but not in the same size.

This is now my favorite hat! I think it’s the girls favorite too! I want to knit more of them!