Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Binary Hat FO! Cheers!

Finally. Finished.
Finished! Trumpets! I present le Hat!

Binary Hat

Pattern: modified Binary Hat by redshirtknitting
Needles: size 8 (Boye interchangeable needles
Yarn: Blue Sky Worsted Hand Dyes Colors 2016 (brown) and 2002 (green)
Modifications: CO 96 +2 stitches to knit flat and then seam, different word, decreased differently - started decreasing on row 35 with k10, k2tog (56 rows total)

Now I can finally put this thing aside and both my brother and sister now have a hat! Yay! I have accomplished something for each. They both have a Christmas present now! Thank the heavens! This hat should have been simple, but so was not. Gauge issues (even though I swatched - grrrr.), stripe issues, length issues and decrease issues all plagued me thoroughout. It might had been easier if I had ever made a plain hat before. I ended up whipping out the Droplet Hat pattern to see how the decreases needed to be done. I liked how that hat decreased, plus it fit well on my model man's head. Good thing is, now I have made a plain hat, and future ones will be easier. (because now I have gone through everything that could possibly go wrong in a hat all in one swoop. - and if you know of other things, don't tell me. I don't want to know anything else will go wrong. ever.)

Ended up starting the decreases on 35th row. Did K1 *K10, K2tog* to last st. K1; next row, P1; next row, K1 *K9, K2tog* to last st. K1; and so on until I had 16 stitches left on the needles. Then I broke the thread, ran it through the 16 stitches, pulling tight and sewed up the seam using mattress stitch.
Decreases are much better now.

Glorious Hat! My brother better like it. (I think he will.) He better.

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

News Flash....binary hat not right again....stay tuned for updates

Yeah. It's too tall. And decreases too fast. Ugh! I made it practically to the end of the decreases and thought that I should hold it around my head to see how things are going. Too tall. Much too tall. And it looks like a rectangle on my head instead of fitting a head's normal shape. revamping it again.

Removing some rows. Ending up with 50 rows total.

Basic hat is now:

CO 96+2 stitches

6 ribbing

6 plain stockinette

Word (24 rows) = 36 rows

14 rows plain stockinette

BO


Decreases will go somewhere in there, over a longer period of time. I just have to figure that out now. (and figure out how to evenly divide 96 stitches at the same time so I end up with a nice looking hat. No funky sections for me.) I need some knitting elves or gnomes to come in the middle of night and finish this for me so I can be out of my misery.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Binary Hat - take 2

I have cast on again for the binary hat. Turns out, I was on with row gauge, but not with the stitch gauge. How could I have messed that up? I always have trouble counting those little stitches and my gauge was supposed to be 4 stitches per inch, but I had 4.5 stitches per inch. Oops. I had another hat made with the same yarn and same gauge so I made my Dad try it on for size. The hat fit him pretty good around but needed about three or four additional rows to be long enough. So, I figured out how many stitches to cast on to make it big enough and to make the decreases evenly spaced. I am very much a perfectionist and I also prefer to do math *gasp* to make sure everything will work out in the end. I'd seriously rather take an hour figuring it out and diagramming it than knitting it and not ending up with what I envisioned.


Here's what I ended up with:


Gauge: 4.5 stitches and 6 rows per inch


Cast on: 96 stitches to be 21.3 inches around


Work for 56 rows.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

FO Droplet Hat

DSCF1090

Yarn: Blue Sky Worsted color 0299 (cranberry)
Pattern: Droplet Hat from Knitting Nature
Mods: added an extra row of bobbles in the brim to make the hat slightly longer, kept the twisted
The first couple pictures show off the color pretty well - reddish hues are so hard to photograph!

Mods: second row of bobbles, ktbl in whole brim area, knitted in the round

I wanted a longer hat that would cover my ears so I added a second row of bobbles in the brim area - (thanks to lynnewio here on ravelry for the inspiration) just repeated the bobble row + the three rows once more.
Also did k-tbl in the knit stitches throughout the bottom band area. (even above the bobbles)
oh - and I changed this hat to knit in the round. I just thought that this hat didn’t need a seam, but this is just my personal preference.

Other notes:
This was my first hat ever knitted.
I used a little more than one skein of yarn. (I think the extra row of bobbles is the reason - and I had a knot in the middle of the skein I chose to use so that also contributed a bit.)





Saturday, December 1, 2007

Binary Hat rocky beginnings

I'm knitting my brother a Binary Hat (from redshirtknitting blog). But I'm putting a different word in it.

Ugh. I cast on and knit a few inches. There is NO WAY that the man's size would have fit my brother's head. I was on gauge too. I'm going to have to measure some poor man's head. (Someone I know, of course!) Could you imagine me going up to strangers asking to measure their heads? Ha ha ha ha ha!