Sunday, December 03, 2006

Leif's Snowflake Hat

This hat was three attempts in the making. First it was too big (I forgot to account for negative ease), then too small (I used a newborn head measurement instead of 1 year), and finally it was JUST RIGHT. Each version I made had a slightly different pattern on it - this one, with the checkerboard at the bottom, was the final one and luckily, my favorite! The fair isle got easier each time and I am glad in a way that it took me so many tries because now I am quite comfortable with holding both strands of yarn.

I used sz 1 needles for the solid portions and 3 for the fair isle bits which worked really well. There is no weird bulge where I switched to a single color. There are two things I am not 100% satisfied with, which are related. The first is that the snowflake pattern is not centered over the front-center of the hat. This is because, had I centered it, the disconnect at the end of each round would have fallen mid-snowflake. As it was, it fell at the very end of the snowflake near the diamonds - the other thing I didn't like. I am not quite sure how to avoid the little jog at the end of a round with fair isle but I am sure I will figure it out eventually!

This yarn is AMAZING. It is so soft and pretty - 100% alpaca, sportweight.

The earflaps - I forget how many stitches I cast on for those - but I picked up 25 stitches across the top of each one. I seem to think I had 112 stitches in total (7 repeats of a 16-stitch repeat snowflake) which means that the front/back were 31 stitches across. The white border was fewer and then I increased after every 3 stitches. After the snowflakes, I decreased 7 times every other row for awhile and then every row.

It fits the recipient remarkably well - and should hopefully allow for a bit of growth too. The earflaps were a bit long - almost long enough to button under his chin - hmmmmmm.
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1 Comments:

At Sunday, December 03, 2006, Blogger Abigail said...

Cute!

 

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