Swatchless

Want an easy way to make a hat with ears?

It’s simple!  Cast on enough stitches to go around your head, then just keep going!

Knit until the hat is about 10 inches long.  It should look approximately like a square.  Finish the top in kitchener stitch.

Since this is for our robotics team, I sewed on the team number after weaving in all the ends.

If “ears” are not what you’re looking for, you could attach pompoms, or bells and make a very simple jester hat (with only two points).

Saturday is over, and I now have a completed ruffled hat.

I like the top part.  It reminds me of soft serve ice cream.

I added an unfolded paperclip to the top of the spiral to keep it upright on top of the hat.  The ruffles don’t roll so much now that the miles of i-cord have been added.

So, now the hunt is on to find someone on the robotics team with enough spirit to wear this hat well.

Robot hats are causing quite the stir.  I think some kids wear them all day long!

A colleague dropped off a newspaper clipping on my desk.  It appears there are some yarn-bombers around town!  It’s not me.  I wish I had enough time to do it though!

Another intriguing crafting idea that I saw was a decoupage project done on church chairs.  Some are just pictures, from cards, magazines, and old calendars I think.

And others have words of motivation…

Enchantment is the Essence, Let Inspiration Flourish

or even poetry.

Cooking and cleaning
Can wait til tomorrow
Cause babies grow up
I’ve learned to my sorrow
So quiet down cobwebs
And dust go to sleep.
I’m rocking my baby
And babies don’t keep.

It’s a great idea for what to do with old chairs and old magazines.

Last week was a busy, stressful one.  The clock change, deadlines at work, stress about an upcoming robotics tournament, fighting off a cold, all contributed to me losing quite a bit of sleep.  I saw 3:00AM roll past 3 days in a row!  To destress I ended up spending a few minutes here and there knitting ruffles….or actually one rather large ruffle!

It’s long enough to be a scarf!  I started, without any real idea of how to make the kind of ruffles I had in my mind.  I knew I wanted one long corkscrew of ruffle going around and around a hat.  Easier said than done!

From my limited knowledge of sewing, I knew that material will gather up if one edge is made smaller than the other.  So I cast on, until my circular needle was comfortably full–so many stitches that I didn’t really want to count.  Then I increased in each one of those stitches (to make the ruffle).  My needles were now very crowded.  *I cast off about 20 stitches, then purled to the end of the row, and then knit back to where I cast off. *  I repeated the part between the stars until I had no more stitches left.  The ruffle is very thin at one end…

…and thicker on the other end.

The poor picture quality was due to post midnight photography with dim lighting.

I was eager to put the ruffles on a hat, so this morning, I knit them onto the hat as it was being constructed.  Again, there’s no real recipe for how to do this.  I knit together 4 stitches of ruffle with 4 stitches of hat each row.  Once I started to decrease, for the crown of the hat, the ruffles got really close together.  I think it looks like a rose from the top right now.  That’s because the ruffles are all curling up.

To fix the curling issue, I’ve decided on a rather tedious plan.  I’m knitting an i-cord border to the outside edge of the ruffle.  It will add weight, and hopefully also add tension to the outside stitches on the cast off edge.

It’s working!  But there’s still a long way to go.

I’m glad that right now, this is the most pressing issue of my day.

Clocks got set back an hour all over Canada today.  That means we got an extra hour to sleep….or in my case, make a ridiculously large pompom. 

My day was spent doing odd jobs around my apartment mostly to procrastinate from getting caught up on work.  For my occasional breaks, I worked on the 2nd hat of the weekend.  I’m really enjoying knitting on large needles–I think these are 6mm circulars, so these hats seem to almost knit themselves!

The goal is to have a hat on the head of every member of the robotics team I mentor.  These rather crazy hats have helped us define our spirit and sense of fun.  They really do make us a “close-knit” team.

I think a hat with ruffles is next.  I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to do it yet though.

My day began when I woke up rather unexpectedly at 4:30 AM.  I spent an hour or two very productively getting paperwork done, and crossing things off my very long “to do” list.  I then got caught up in a fun stripey hat that I had been knitting on and off for the last 2 days.  I have no progress pictures, because at 4:30 in the morning I just don’t think of finding my camera!

Finished Product

It was concert day today, and I’ve not been feeling 100% lately, so I took it easy and knit/slept a lot.  I was able to save up enough energy to sing well tonight, and I was also able to bring a completed hat to show some other knitters in the choir.

For sale at the concert were goodies from a local group called Calcutta Rescue Canada, a group that raises funds to help in schools and hospitals in India.   The sale continues all weekend at 193 Earl Street, so go check it out on Sunday Nov.7th from 11AM-3:00PM. 

Their products are beautiful, unique, reasonably priced, and benefit disadvantaged people in India.

I’m on a roll these days.  This is hat number 5 that I’ve knit in the past 10 days.  I sit back and marvel at this fact, knowing that I have also done a lot of other things in the past 10 days.  I believe that knitting brings balance for me.  It provides time in an otherwise busy and sometimes stressful day to let my fingers create something and let my mind wander.

There are some weeks when I don’t get the opportunity to pick up my needles at all.   Those weeks, I end up focused on deadlines and the endless list of small tasks that must get done.  Efficiency decreases….motivation decreases….frustration increases….until I give myself a time out and start another project.

Hats are nice and small.   They are portable, and progress speeds up as you approach the crown.  I really enjoyed making this hat because the colours are fun, and the texture is so great to photograph.  I am excited to try this in different (non-robotic) colourways.

As a finishing touch I embroidered a glow-in-the-dark robot onto the hat, along with our team number (2809).  These are the trademarks of a hat for K-Botics.  I think my next hat will have a pocket…or ears…it will definitely be unique, that’s for sure!  Tomorrow I’ll cast on and see what happens.

Last November, when I was a fairly new blogger, I stumbled upon an online challenge for the month.  The challenge involves spending time every day creating art of some kind.  Leah, who runs the challenge, has gathered a real following!  If you want to join, you can sign up here.

Last year’s challenge kept me focused on doing something creative every day.  I knit mostly–no real surprise there–but it’s fun to look at a work in progress every day and watch it grow.  It was also interesting to look at my knitting in a more artistic way.  There are many textures and colours and shadows…and the close up view often looks quite different from the project as a whole.

It’s a good feeling to rush home after work, seek out the dying light of day to photograph my art-in-progress and share it with a community of very creative bloggers.  Unfortunately I missed the daylight today….after swimming 2km this afternoon I crashed, and slept soundly for a good 3 hours.

So….today, the first of November, I start off my month of artistic blogging with my robotic hat (in progress).  This is the fifth hat of this season, made for members of K-Botics, a high school robotics team that I mentor.  Our hats are unique, each one matching the personality or style of the team member.  They are all knit from blue, purple, black and white, and all have our team number and a robot on them somewhere.

What’s your most crazy/creative hat ideas?  I’m looking to be inspired.

The tessellation toque now has been completed.  Ends are woven in, ribbing was added around the edge to finish things off and make sure the brim didn’t roll too much.

I enjoyed adding the finishing details of our team number, and our robot to some of the less intricate hexagons.

All of the embroidery skills I learned in Brownies has come in handy with these robotics hats.  French knots and chain stitch are my friends!

Our team has been keeping me busy these days, so there hasn’t been much other knitting going on.  If you want to read about what’s going on in the wonderful world of high school robotics, have a look at our blog.

I’m looking for inspiration for some more creative and different hats. 

What is the most ridiculous hat you’ve ever seen?

I’m rather struck by hexagons these days.

They are fun to knit, and can be made with many intricate designs, or stripes.  What’s really cool is that they can be joined together to form a flat surface.

Do you want to use up your yarn stash and make some hexagons too?  Here are my steps.

1. Cast on 6 stitches (this is what makes it a hexagon).

2. Increase one stitch in every stitch (I knit into the front and back of each stitch to do this) [12 stitches]

3. Kfb, K1 around [18 stitches]

4. Kfb, K2 around [24 stitches]

5. Kfb, K3 around [30 stitches]

Keep going, and you can make a really big hexagon!  I’ve made mine with 10 stitches per side [60 stitches around].

I’ve joined them up as I go to form a tube (it’s taken 12 hexagons so far).  Now I’m trying to figure out how to make hexagons curve into a dome shape to form the top of the hat.  I think some hexagons are going to be slightly misshapen to make this happen.

This project is fun because I can sit down and make a hexagon or two at a time, and see great progress being made.  Sometimes if you sit down and knit 6 rows on a hat, you don’t really see the difference.  The one thing I’m not looking forward to is the number of ends I’ll have to sew in to finish this hat, but I think the end result will be worth it!