Knit n Things

It's finally done. The hat from hell. It doesn't look like the devil incarnate does it? It looks like a nice simple hat done in plain stockinette stitch. Nothing fancy, no cables, no yarn overs, or intricate intarsia. It should have taken me no time at all to do this annoying little hat. Yup - that's what I said when I cast it on, "this will be a quick Christmas present, won't take me anytime at all." That's when the powers that be decided to mess with me. How dare you, you insignificant little knitter you think you can whip out a project in a week I'll show you!!!


This is what it looked like when I went to Rhinebeck. I don't know if you can tell in this photo but those are jogging stripes. I didn't know about jogging stripes when I started this hat. I had heard of them but didn't really understand what they were. I do now. I had the whole stripe part of the hat finished and I looked down at it and ... well it looked like crap! All the stripes were uneven and to add insult to injury I had taken the dark blue and caught it in the back to carry up for the next row instead of cutting. Well you could see the dam dark blue on the front, it caught funny and got trapped on the wrong dam side of the fabric! It look horrible so I (who doesn't rip when it can be fudged) wound up ripping out the entire stripe section. Took a few lessons about jogging and started again.
Managed to make it through the stripes the second time with no problems and it turned out rather well. Onto the decreases!

That went great until I got to within an inch of the end... I looked at my hat and hmmm doesn't that look a little short? I put the stitches onto waste yarn & tried it on. Yup the stupid thing didn't even cover my ears. Rip - Rip -Rip. I hate ripping. I'd rather fudge it that rip it out. But here I was ripping out this "simple" hat again. I wound up starting the increases to soon (twice) I finally came to the conclusion that the pattern I was loosely following had ear flaps so was a bit shorter in the body that a regular hat. Which is why I kept screwing up the decreases. What a brainiac! Oh well it turned out really cute in the end! I've finally got one Christmas present down & only 4 more to go! At this rate I might not make it.