So over our summer break I took the kids home to Australia to visit the grandparents and friends. Whilst we were there my best friend took me to the Bus Depot Markets in Canberra. I asked her before hand if there was likely to be any wool for sale there and her response was "she hadn't really noticed before" well you can tell she's not into knitting ...it turned out that every second stall was full of the most delicious wool I've found for a long time. I found a beautiful sock weight hand dyed merino wool in shades of greens and glitters but wasn't sure about the the price so said I would come back - only to find that by the time I got around the markets and back to the stall it was gone...That'll teach me to wiffle waffle about. So when I found a beautiful skein of hand dyed merino super chunky in shades of turquoise and purple (the exact shade of my hair at the moment if truth be known) I decided I had to have it. I had no idea what I was going to make it into but there was a niggling thought in the back of my mind that I needed a shrug/long sleeves to wear when its not quite cold enough for a jumper but too cold for just a shirt.
I got back to Mum and Dads house and went though mums stash of knitting needles.....unfortunately she didn't have anything large enough to deal with this super super chunky wool so up to the local craft store I went to buy a 20 cm diameter circular needle. (am I the only one whose holiday souvenirs consist of wool, fabric and notions?) and I immediately got to work. I did a search on Ravely for the pattern I wanted and of course it wasn't there so after a quick swatch I wrote up a basic pattern and got started.....and halfway through my pattern ran out of wool.....slump....
OK I ripped it all apart and rewrote the pattern to hopefully use less wool.....and iteration #2....failed....to be ripped out again. So iteration #3. Surely this has got to work.... A couple of days later I finish it off.....still too short. I could give it to my daughter.......nahhh I'm not wasting this beautiful wool on her....OK I give up. Sleeves/shrug are not going to work with the amount of wool that I have. At this point I gave up till I got home and had all my supplies and some time to figure out what was going on.
Once home I decided that the shrug idea just wasn't feasible so I needed something that took less wool. Obviously a hat. Thankfully living in this part of New England woolen hats are a necessity and I only have 1 really good one at the moment, so I decided that I would make this beautiful wool into the most snuggly, lovely hat.
A long time ago I played with the idea of making a hat and scarf in one. That experiment didn't really work as the wool I chose was too thin to be of use in the freezing cold of an Alaskan winter.
But it was just too much hat/scarf for the sort of temperatures that it could handle. I still really like the idea so I decided to play around with it again and see what I could come up with/had enough wool for. I ended up with this.
Its basically just a simple beanie knitted in the round using an existing beanie to judge when I needed a decrease row. and then a long cable knitted separately and sewed around the brim. Halfway through the cable length, where it goes around the front and the back edges of the hat, I split the cable into two and took it from a 3x4 cable pattern (three stitches in each column twisted every 4 rows to a 2 x 2 cable pattern (2 stitches in each column twisted every second row), then joined the two sections back together at the other side of the hat
I quite like the resulting piece. It can be worn with the edges dangling in not too bad weather,
or wrapped around as a scarf on those horrible New England mornings when I have to drag myself out of bed and take the kids to school.
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