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…