Warm but neutral ear coverings to get me through the end of winter.
I’ve been wearing my plaid earflap hat a lot this winter. It’s been cold and my ears seem to want to freeze without earflaps. The coat I’m currently wearing is red, and it all .. doesn’t really go together. So I set out to make a new, slightly more neutral hat. I grabbed the leftovers from a larp cape project and a scarf and got to work.
For this version I used the Whitney Sews pattern for a newsboy hat with some modifications. There were still some brim inserts in the hoard, so I traced that shape and used it as the brim. Then I took the original earflap pattern from the first hat add added those too. I did decide to cut a wedge off the top so they would fit better.
I’m quite proud of the point matching of the top of the hat and the lining. It turned out very neat, but made the hat also look a bit naked. So after faffing about with my button press, I managed to make a nice covered button for the top, to finish it off. I hope this one becomes a firm favourite even if the amount of poof in the hat is less than I hoped for.
I have so much dyed yarn and not enough projects, so I cast on for a quick and easy hat to reduce the stash by one ball of yarn. The yarn was Donegal DK yarn, dyed with dark greens in December of 2023. I chose the Knitted Newsboy Cap by Nicola Robinsonova as the pattern.
I first cast on for a hat on 4.5 mm needles, and was on gauge following the instructions. The pattern is very easy and I managed to finish it fairly quickly, however, when I put it on my head it was more a beret than a newsboy cap. A bit too tight for my liking. I did continue to knit the brim to see how it would work together. I own some plastic brim inserts so I modified the brim pattern a little bit by knitting short rows to mimic the insert’s shape better. I pinned it together and it was just too tight.
Luckily, the pattern also listed a more slouchy version using 5.5 mm needles and after weighing my leftover yarn, I hoped I would have enough. So I crossed my fingers and cast on. Who knew that 1 extra mm of diameter would make such a difference! This new version is a perfect amount of slouch and makes a lovely hat. To add a safety/fun touch, I also knit a band with reflective yarn that’s attached with two very cute blue buttons. When I cycle in the dark, I should light up!
There is less than a meter of this yarn left, and my bucket of dyed yarn has reduced in size a little bit. My stash of hats has increased by two: one green beret and one green slouchy brimmed hat. Best way to ‘mess up’ a project is to end up with two great end products!
Frogs perching on lily pads make the best head gear.
I’ve been subscribed to Dot Pebbles a.k.a. Claire Garland’s newsletter for a few years now, and every so often I get a free pattern for a knit animal. These knits are always very life-like and look insanely complicated. I made the polar bear before and while it all worked out, I wasn’t sure it would while knitting it. So I’ve been eyeing the Frog pattern that’s been making the rounds on the internet recently. I thought I had received it a while ago in my free patterns too. Turns out that I indeed had and I really wanted to have a frog…
Since I really wasn’t sure if it was going to work, I tried to get similar yarns to the ones Claire Garland suggests. I got some drops kid-silk in my mailbox and dyed some fingering weight yarn in ‘toad-green’. The body and legs of the frog were going to be toad-green with apple-green kid-silk. It’s belly was undyed yarn with moonshine kid-silk.
Knitting the body is really fast. I only deviated from the pattern once, by skipping the mouth stitches. I couldn’t get them to work and it just looked awful. Once the body was done, I knit the legs and arms on. At that point, I decided that I need him to be posable so I found some armature wire in my stash and added that. When I make the frog again, I’m going to try to use the wire while knitting, instead of when it’s all done. That way, I can probably hide the ends without having to use so many bits of yarn. With the wire in, froggy can do push ups or sit awkwardly instead of just flop down.
So I had a completed frog when my mother sent an invite for her birthday party. The assignment was to wear ‘your best head gear’. I knew I wanted to wear my green Rita-cousin dress, so I wanted to make some sort of hat that would work with that. I also had this frog. 1+1 = 2 and I decided to make a lily-pad fascinator with the frog pinned to the top. The lily pad pattern was based on the left leaf from an image on the internet. I cut it out from the same green fabric as the dress, stretched over some foam. I then added some hair clips to the bottom. The frog was maneuvered into a normal sitting frog and safety-pinned onto the lily pad.
I love this thing. It’s adorable, it doesn’t hurt while wearing it, it’s got a frog, what’s not to like!
Relatively recently, in May, my brother Peter and his partner Cathelijne came to visit me. We’d planned to do some yarn dyeing just for them to see what it was about. We chose two skeins for each after deciding what I would make from the finished yarn and set to work.
My brother wanted to use the Natural Boo DK yarn, a merino and bamboo mix for a hat/scarf. His plan was to do blue with yellow resists. Surprisingly similar to my starry night sweater – I did not influence this! His yarns were left dry and he added tie wrap resists. A fair few, just to see what would happen. We dunked his yarn into a mixture of blue and navy dyes and pulled it out once that was all set. When we removed the resists, it turned out that if you put two relatively close together, you just get a larger resist. He then added yellow over the top with a syringe. It turned out pretty cool!
Cathelijne wanted to have a triangular scarf like my fringed one. I told her that would be cool, but I wasn’t going to knot all those fringes again, we’d figure out something else. So she settled on Quarter round yarn (fingering weight 100% merino) and would be doing one part grey with yellow and blue speckles in the white parts. This yarn was pre-soaked and once wet enough, we added a little bit of grey to the pot and created a nice construction to keep enough of the yarn white. Once the grey had set, we pulled it out, and she hand-speckled citric acid mixed with dye over the top of it. Most of the speckles are blue and yellow, but sometimes two landed close together and there’s a tiny green area.
All projects were knit on the knitting machine. For Peter’s snood, I cast on a fair amount of stitches on every alternate needle. I made a two eyelets a few rows in and then hung the hem. I continued until almost all the yarn was finished. The bottom hem was then sewn so it looked like the hung hem at the top. I also wanted to make a cord, and I figured, there must be a way that this machine can do i-cord. So I fumbled with the settings and zipped my way through probably several hundred rows to make a nice i-cord to thread through the upper hem.
The bamboo earflap hat was based on a pattern from Clearwater Knits, Earflap Hat by Irene Woods. Since I used a different gauge and a different head size, I recalculated everything. It was started on the knitting machine with e-wrap cast on on 134 stitches, then 18 rows of plain knit, then the flaps were created over 32 stitches from stitch 13 inwards. It was basically like a big sock heel. Then 18 more rows and the hem was hung. Then I knit until I almost ran out of yarn, pulled it off the machine and knit up the top by decreasing in 12 sections. I left two stitches out for seaming up the back. Lastly, I put some fleece into the flaps for added warmth and added braids to the bottom of the flaps.
For the triangular scarf, I used exactly the same pattern as for the fringed scarf, but I left off the fringe. When I got to place where you need to start decreasing again, I did a row of decorative eyelets to mimic the ones that would be along the spine too. I then finished the scarf the same way as my fringed one and put it out to block. Once it was fully blocked, there was still some yarn leftover to make some cute little tassels. There’s one on each long end and two on the point.
All in all, I think this was fun to do with family!
To add to the little Giraffe gift, I wanted to make an animal themed hat. It needed to be a safari animal and my Ravelry searches unearthed a zebra version. Baby Zebra by Marji LaFreniere, a cute little hat in black and white with a mane down the back. I didn’t want to make it too complicated so I knit the body of the hat on the knitting machine. Since the yarn was very thick, I cast on my 74 stitches (72 + 2 for seaming down the back) by putting 2 needles in work and skipping the next one. Once I reached the length, I pulled the knitting off the machine and onto 4 mm needles.
Since a hat needs to be smaller on top, I did the decreases by hand. Once it was done, I sewed the back seam, leaving space for the tufts of the mane. I made the ears mostly according to the pattern (either the maker can’t count or I can’t because the row numbers didn’t match up) and attached those to the hat. I then cut lengths of yarn and knotted those in the seam of the back for the mane.
I have No Idea whether or not this hat is actually baby sized. I’m notoriously bad at this, generally making baby hats sized for like 1 to 2 year old kiddos. We’ll see on which end of the spectrum this one ends up. The bottom of the hat rolls a bit, but I think it still like it. You can also still see the skipped needles in the body of the hat, it almost looks like ribbing. However, I still think this thing is stinking cute!
Made some baby gifts from self-dyed yarn and other happy fabric.
Baby gift time again! First up, dyeing. On the last day of 2022, the second dye project was a single skein of Chester Wool DK 115 (Worsted) 50s. It is 100% merino and has 50 grams in a skein for around 100 meters of yarn. Since I still had soft yellow dye stock left from the other dyeing I did that day, I put 20 ml of the stock in my pot. Then I added several resists around the skein and dropped the thing into the pot. When it had simmered for long enough, I took it out and dyed the resists turquoise. I couldn’t resist adding some speckles and chose orange. All in all this meant that the skein turned out extremely bright and cheerful. If you ask me, perfect for a baby.
Since there was going to be a new baby, I set out to make some baby things and settled on these two patterns: Easy Peasy Baby Ball by A la Sascha and Tiny Tot by Kristen Rettig. One is a rectangle hat with tassels or pompoms and the other is a ball. I used up the entire skein in the making of these projects, so no leftovers!
I’ve also had a bit of flannel in the stash with a similar colour scheme. There’s also some additional red and green, but I wouldn’t let that stop me. The flannel was bought to make some poppies, so I set out to do exactly that. I tried to make these somewhat symmetrical with the plaid, so the scale was based on that. There’s some difference between these two poppies, one has a green stripe near the head, the other green. One has larger hands, the other smaller, but they are still very similar.
Both knitting patterns were quick, easy to knit and went smoothly. Of course the hat is way too big for the recipient, but I guess my track record stays intact on that score. The last item for the little baby was a spit scarf. Now with skateboarders, rope jumpers and a terry cloth back. It feels very soft even if the snap is on the wrong edge.
I hope the little one will have a marvelous and colourful life!
With the last of the leftovers, made a jaunty hat.
After the success of the Nutmeg leftover sweater, I set out to finally get rid of the last bits of that yarn that had been hanging out in the stash for way too long. So on New Years Eve, I got the knitting machine ready, and cast on some stitches to see what the settings needed to be. Turns out that it was impossible to knit this yarn when casting on on every needle of the machine, so I had to skip every alternate needle. This did mean that while knitting, it was very wide but it would shrink in width and expand in length when off the machine. Since I was fairly uninterested in actually doing a super good job, I just cast on the maximum amount of stitches that would fit and figured it would probably be fine.
I was actually inspired to knit this thing by this video. While looking for a tutorial for a triangular scarf on the knitting machine, one of this channel popped up. After I watched it, it moved on to this new video and I decided to watch that too. I didn’t do any of the special things, but I did get the idea that rectangle hats were a thing. So after the cast on, I just knit until there was no more red yarn, then I switched to the white until that was all gone too. Next up, blue and because I didn’t think it was long enough yet, I also added two of the leftover tiny balls of grey. The rectangle of knitting was taken off the machine and I used knitting needles for the cast off. Then I sewed the sides and top together et voila, hat!
Since there is no further stitching in the hat, you can just fold over the bottom grey edge any way you want. I’ve been doing a fold in such a way that there is a three layer bottom and no purl is on show. Of course, you can also just fold it over and have purl visible. The points of the hat can be back to front or side to side or at any given jaunty angle. In the end, I used 45 g of grey, 15 g of red, 15 g of white and 37 g of blue. This means that I now only have 34 g of grey and 27 g of black leftover. We’re getting to the bottom of this particular yarn stash!
We had a sort of vague commitment to doing some sort of Halloween in the office since it was on a workday for the first time in a while. So I decided that I was going to bring the project, which I’d been eyeing up for years, to life. You see, in 2018, Bernadette Banner posted a video about a Winter Witch Hat and then another one about a similar hat in 2020. I’ve been thinking about recreating that for literal years, but never actually got around to it. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to make myself a new hat, suitable for winter.
Since the videos above weren’t full tutorials, I scoured the internet and found some other examples of people taking on this project (ash_rock and Fresh Frippery). This last one is an actual tutorial so I took those instructions and ran with them. Since I wanted the hat to sit more ‘over’ my head than ‘on’ my head, I increased all the measurements. The original plan was to make it out of black wool, but since that fabric is quite precious, I decided to make a test version out of left-over fabric from these pants.
Two brims, one crown and two ear flaps were cut from the plaid. The brims and crown were interfaced for some stiffness and the earflaps were lined with some nice warm fleece. I put the hat together and then decided to line the inside of the crown too. I found some of the interlining from my red coat that matched well in colour and sewed it in. The ugliness is hidden with some bias tape. If I’d been fully awake throughout the project, it probably would’ve gone a lot quicker. However, I did finish it in a day and I’ve been very happy with it. I think it’s cute and I love the little fold-over point. If I make it again, I’m going to make the hole for my head a little bit bigger, but it’s not too annoying this way.
Just to give you some joy this Christmas, I recently made a hat for my Tyrannosaurus Rex. Here he is, just ambling along with his slight preference for going left. He’s got a turning circle of about 2 meters. There’s no pattern to the hat, just increased from six red stitches until it was wide enough and then added in a few rows of white fluffy stuff. I also made a tiny pompom for the top. I get a lot of joy from this little thing.
If you click the dinosaur, he’ll open up a YouTube window and walk around with his little hat!
Using more leftovers to make a new hat that also keeps my ears warm!
Recently, I got the urge to make a new hat. In my head was the idea to make a witch’s hat like this one from Bernadette Banner. But then I remembered that a) I wear my hair up nearly always without any pins and it needs to be somewhere, b) I want to wear a hat to keep my head (and ears) warm because winter and c) I wear hats to keep the rain out of my eyes. So on to plan b, make a ‘baker boy cap’ type thing, but add ear flaps! I grabbed the one cap that I’d made before and popped it on my head to see where the ear flaps needed to go. Turns out that they would have to be directly beside the brim, so that was a lucky coincidence.
Outside
Inside
I grabbed some scraps from the green plaid pants that I have kept all these years. Eked out all the pattern pieces exactly and got to work. The ear flaps were lined with a black fleece for additional warmth and I put in a braid of the ‘yarn’ I’ve been using for stuffed animal eyes, to tie under my chin. I sewed most of it together and then had to make a lining. I chose to just put my pattern pieces down, make a circle-ish shape out of it and add the darts back in. It seems to work fine so far. For the button on top, I found a self-cover-button-kit. I’ve been attempting to use that kit for a while now and never managed to make a button. However, I finally had an epiphany: I just needed to be stronger! In comes a glue clamp thing that I’d never used before. So I popped the pieces in, and clamped the clamp over them and tightened, something I couldn’t manage with just my hands. The bottom of the button suddenly stayed in; miraculous. I made two other buttons but ended up not using them.
Button top
Keeps my hair dry too!
The hat’s been on a few test rides now, and I think it’s wonderful. I may look like a bit daft but I’ve never let that stop me before! My ears and head stay nice and warm, and it’s got a lot more of a brim than the knitted ear flap hat I was wearing all through last winter.
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