Ruthless Knitting

Today is my dad’s birthday. Happy birthday, Dad! Here is his hat:

Pattern: Pentagon #5 from Anna Zilboorg’s 45 Fine and Fanciful Hats to Knit (New York, NY: Sterling, 1999)
Size: The band at the bottom is sized at about 19″.
Yarn: Knit Picks Telemark (100 percent wool; 103 yds per 50g skein), one skein each of Lichen, Colonial Blue, Delft Heather, Squirrel Heather, and Icicle.
Yardage: I’m not sure. I have a lot left. Does that help?
Source: Knit Picks
Needles: US 5 Denise circular needles
Gauge: About 6.5 stitches per inch in color pattern
Notes: Dad requested that I make him a hat several months ago. (Dad: “Your mother sent you a hat book, right?” Me: “Yes.” Dad: “So where is my hat?”) This was a fun and really quick project, which I completed when I was supposed to be making the Middlebury cardigan sleeves.

I’ve had 45 Fine and Fanciful Hats to Knit for a while now, but this is the first thing I’ve made from the book. One reason for this is that there are some seriously strange hats in it. Well, okay, maybe “strange” is unkind. Let’s say that there are some seriously fanciful hats in this book. And while there is nothing wrong with fanciful hats, I found it hard to decide whether I would really like any of these hats, for myself or for someone else. Still, I was determined to knit a hat for my dad as he requested. The “cone” hats tempted me because they are relatively conservative in shape, but I kept being drawn to the pentagon hats. After getting input from my mom, who favored the pentagons, I decided on Pentagon #5, with the understanding that it might just be too strange for my dad to wear it.

45 Fine and Fanciful Hats receives some rather hostile reviews on Amazon.com from people who argue that it is not really a pattern book, since Zilboorg omits to give anything but scanty information about gauge, does not specify yarns, possibly gives incorrect instructions about what weight of yarn to use, and provides only very brief written directions and charts for each hat. I would agree that the book could be easier to use. To make a hat, you have to start in the introduction to figure out your gauge and yarn choice, and you have to pick which one of three edgings you want to do. Then you have to follow the brief instructions at the beginning of your particular chapter to determine how many stitches to cast on and what kind of increases and decreases to use. You have to go with your own gut to determine how to do the stranding and where to place the increases and decreases, and you also have to know enough about charted patterns to understand how to turn the chart for your particular hat into the hat shown. Oh, and you have to use the photographs to gauge where to switch colors, since the charts don’t show color changes. To my mind, all of this made using the book a challenge and an adventure, and I am always up for a nice knitting challenge. Still, I can see why everyone wouldn’t necessarily feel the same way.

I only made a few modifications to the pattern. First and most obviously, I wanted to use DK rather than worsted yarn, so I added an extra repeat to the pattern, turning it into a hexagon hat. I also used some soft sock yarn (leftover Henry’s Attic Kona Superwash Fingering) to knit a hemmed lining. I did this because the braided edge was curling, because I thought the sock yarn would feel better against Dad’s forehead than Telemark (which is tolerably soft, but not luxurious), and because the lining makes the hat thicker and therefore warmer.

I disregarded the blocking instructions, which involve using an iron, in favor of wet-blocking the hat over cardboard forms that I made to fit inside the hexagon and the brim. In the process, I was reminded of how poor my grasp of geometry is. Let’s not discuss how many times I tried to draw a hexagon of the proper dimensions on cardboard, only to find that I had drawn an octagon.

Despite these tribulations, the results are good: I like this hat! It’s plenty weird, but I think its weirdness falls within acceptable bounds. We’ll see what my dad thinks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 30th, 2007 at 5:47 am and is filed under Finished Objects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.