i have long been

in search of ‘the hat’.

it has streamlined ribbing,

fast decreases that allow the top to lie nearly flat

while at the same time puckering, intentionally, just a bit.

the stitches are small,

the yarn fine, but even more importantly it is airy and light.

the closest i’ve ever come

is a machine made, store bought one

and that is so not what i had in mind.

a while back i got two skeins of berroco folio

with the intention

of making a hat like billy gibbons’.

this dk weight yarn is soft and weighs next to nothing.

i thought this would give just the right drape to the faux dreads.

in reality, the viscose in the mix makes it almost slippery

which makes manipulating the ‘dread’ stitch pattern a chore

and no matter how cool something looks, i don’t want it to be a chore to make.

so, this week i revisited (been doing a lot of that lately)

the untouched beginnings

of my billy gibbons hat and rolled the lovely

folio back up into a new ball of ‘ready to become’.

decided somewhere in the midst of the rolling, that perhaps this was ‘the yarn’

to make ‘the hat’ with.

a few hours of pleasant knitting later

 and i am 2/3rds of the way to the firm possibility of ‘the hat’.

feeling so excited about it,

that last night when it got too dark to continue the actual knitting,

i wrote out the decreases

this, my friends is just not the way that i usually do things.

my definitions of hat ‘decreases’ are the things that you put lifelines in for

because you wing them as you go

so as to avoid having to write

the actual math out first

(i’m a bad designer, i know, but not this time).

so, if all goes smoothly after the kiddos go to bed,

i should know by midnight if this is ‘the hat’ or if i’ve not quite found ‘it’ yet.

itching to knit a bit more to find out…

‘wing’ taken from 19:4 of exodus.