Christmas Hats 2009

The blog seems to have taken a break for the holidays right along with me, but now there is much to report, since the vacation from school has given me a chance to do some serious knitting. In the interests of efficiency, I think I will break it down into several installments between now and next Monday (when classes start), rather than trying to cram everything into one enormous post...

I ended up making three different hats as Christmas gifts for 2009. One had been planned for several months. It was a repeat for my elderly mother of the Stained Glass Beret that I made for myself over the summer. I used Madeline Langan's lovely pattern again and dipped into the very same bag of leftover Brown Sheep wool, so the two hats are virtual twins. Here are pre-felting pictures of both the outside and the inside of my mother's hat, plus one of the outside in its finished form. As always, click on any of these images to get a closer look.

Mom was absolutely *delighted* with her present!! The vibrant colors (all her favorites) strongly appealed to her, just as I knew they would, and when she put the hat on her head, she discovered to her immense satisfaction that it fits perfectly and is extremely warm. The felting actually makes it wind-proof, which is a Godsend in the midst of a New England winter. We visited with her several times after Christmas, and she was never without her new favorite headgear. Chalk this one up as a BIG WIN.

The other two hats were much more impromptu affairs, inspired by my brother's suggestion that we give his two sons Barnes & Noble gift certificates, allowing them to choose what they wanted for themselves. As he spoke, I suddenly got the idea of making a hat for each nephew so that I could label the gift card as follows: "For your head and what's inside it..."

After casting about on Ravelry for the appropriate pattern, I lit upon Thorpe by Kirsten Kapur. This popular design features earflaps and tassled ties. The pattern was extremely easy to follow and adapt from bulky to worsted weight yarn. I chose two different bright colors of 100% wool from my stash, both with white trim, and improvised a striped pattern for the brim that would set off the jewel tones to good advantage. A clever suggestion from Kathryn Ivy's blog allowed me to make the stripes without an unsightly jog at the start of each round. Click on either image for a larger view.

The blue hat was for the 8-year-old, and I was able to finish it in time for Christmas. The red one, for his teenage brother, took a bit longer, so he got yarn & needles (a.k.a. the knitter's promissory note) under the tree & the finished hat a day or two later. Both brothers loved their new headgear. The younger one did not want to take his off!! I am still waiting for photographic evidence from their father, to document the end result, but I think it is safe to chalk up two more BIG WINS for Christmas 2009.

P.S. re Stained Glass Beret

Although at first I had used the convex side of the plate to put pressure on the crown and stretch it into a perfect circle, I then flipped the plate over part way through the drying process to help shape the lower portions of the beret as well. This stratagem seems to have worked out nicely.

Stained Glass Beret

Hooray!! The stained glass beret is done. It was a quick & easy knit. I found the pattern extremely well-written & easy to follow. This is such a clever & elegant design, the way the fan shapes fit together to create the stained glass "rose window" effect...

Of course, with all the color changes, there were approximately 10,000 loose ends to weave in before felting. You cannot quite get away with weaving them all as you go either, because the way the fans are constructed in interlacing rounds requires leaving an open loop at the tip of each fan that cannot be tightened & tied down until 2 rounds later, but I strongly recommend taking care of them ASAP (as I did) rather than saving them all for the very end. Fortunately, once you get them into place, the felting process really helps hold them there.

Here are two photos: one (on the left) taken before felting, where you can still see the stitch definition, and the other (on the right) taken after felting while the piece was drying. Click on either one to get a closer look. I suppose it almost goes without saying, but the Lamb's Pride yarn felted *beautifully*. And I like my color scheme even better in the final felted version than when I laid out all the yarns side-by-side.

As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, the pattern calls for a dinner plate to be inserted after felting to help ensure that the beret will dry in the correct shape. I knew instinctively which of our various china patterns would turn out to be the right size, but it took a bit of effort when the time came to get the object properly situated. I felt a little silly for a moment there, if truth be told, until I had won the wrestling match, and then my self-consciousness suddenly turned to instant triumph. To my delight, the "crown" of the beret immediately stretched into a perfect circle, and I believe the fact that the rim around the plate makes it slightly convex rather than strictly flat means that the finished object will more easily fit onto my head, which, thankfully, is also not flat on top. ;-)

And now.... STAINED GLASS KNITTING!!

Honestly, who *isn't* fascinated by the ethereal glow of sunlight through stained glass??

The image hyperlinked in my rhetorical question above comes, of course, from the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. I will NEVER forget the moment (Was it really more than 20 years ago? Sheesh!) when I first stepped into that exquisite little Gothic treasure house and looked up. The play of light was quite literally breathtaking — and now my knitting can reflect some of that same saturation of color, thanks to designer Madeline Langan of Knitting Dreams. I have one project already going and another about to start, with a promise of more to come...

The first project is a lovely felted beret with a stained glass motif, done entirely with yarns from my stash (YIPPEE!!). I happened to have some Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride (85% wool, 15% mohair) left over from two long-ago sweaters. What fun to be putting those remnants to good use after all these years. It may not be exactly the same rainbow color scheme as the original, but I think that the intense jewel tones of magenta, mauve, periwinkle, royal blue, teal, and emerald green will produce an authentic stained glass effect. Click on the image to the right to take a closer look at the yarn.

Here is what the work-in-progress looks like so far. The beret is a quick knit in the round on US size 10 (6 mm) needles, moving upwards from the base toward the center of the crown. The stained glass pattern consists of brightly colored fan shapes made one at a time in six decreasing rounds, each outlined in black. I have just started the third round of fans (in periwinkle), and I am very excited about how it looks so far. Click on the image to the right for a larger view.

This is a great pattern, well-written and easy to follow. I expect to finish the beret in fairly short order. The instructions call for a dinner plate to be inserted into the crown after felting to help it dry in the correct shape. That part should be particularly fun!! I can't wait to have a nice warm felted hat this winter, and if all goes well, I should be able to make one or two more of these as Christmas presents.

The second project meanwhile is going to take a lot longer, especially in the planning stages but also to knit, simply because it will be a larger piece. It is the Bar Harbor Shell Bag.

This beauty — and the potential for others like it — has been on my mind for most of the summer. After a *LOT* of shopping around on-line, I ordered a total of eight skeins of Noro Kureyon in six different shades (#40, #163 x2, #219, #220, #240, #250 x2), mostly from Paradise Fibers, but also from Yarnela and The Knitting Garden. The pattern calls for only 5 or 6 skeins, but I really wanted a wide range of colors (especially reds, greens, blues, pinks, and purples) with a minimum of waste. As always, click on the image to take a closer look.

Thanks to the vagaries of the postal service, it took two or three weeks for everything that I ordered to arrive, but now that all the skeins are finally here, I will soon start dissecting them and organizing the various pieces by color into their proper families, so that I can pick and choose exactly the right shades. I definitely have enough material for more than one project, but my plan is to knit one bag first, and then see what I have left. Then I can easily order more yarn in the colors required for a second bag.

There are so many intriguing possibilities here... For instance, I thought about arranging the colors at random (as the designer suggests for her Stained Glass Fan Bag), but for this first adventure, I think I will put them in rows, perhaps also imitating the alternation between dark-to-light and light-to-dark that I have always been so fond of in this beloved crocheted afghan that I finished in the 8th grade. The original pattern is long gone, I'm afraid, but it came from a women's magazine sold at the grocery store. One of these days I may get around to reproducing it, but for now all I have is the finished object, which has been a favorite of mine for decades.

The possibilities for drawing needlework inspiration from the world of stained glass are limitless, and I fully intend to enjoy myself here. No deadlines or time-pressure, or worrying about what anyone else will think, just a wishing-well of gorgeous color that I can dip into and explore ad libitum. EXACTLY the sort of escapist pleasure, in other words, that a stressed out professor will undoubtedly need from time to time when the new semester gets into full swing and everything starts happening all at once. :-)