In Which the Pirate Begins a New Hat.

While the commitment trying to start and finish a project during the Olympics is more than I want to take on right now, *starting* seemed easy enough. (Starting is always the easy part, isn’t it.) And so, while I watched the Opening Ceremonies, I cast on for a new colourwork hat, with the same Cascade 220 that I used for Michael’s bicolour hat.

My original plan had been to use a two-colour cast on, knit some corrugated ribbing, then pick up stitches from the cast on edge and knit a facing in a slightly thinner yarn, the leftover sportweight lambswool from my old Highwayman Armwarmers. That didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped, but before I ripped it all out to start over, I took this video of the way I work the corrugated ribbing:

I hold both strands of yarn in my left hand, the darker one over my index finger and the lighter over my middle finger. The working yarns are wrapped twice around my pinky to maintain tension, which is why they look as if they’re twisted together. Normally when I’m knitting with just one strand, it’s only wrapped once, but with two (or more) strands they pull against each other and get a little loose.

Anyway, I didn’t like the way the cast-on edge looked after I’d picked up the stitches, so I scrapped it and started over with a new technique. Instead of starting with the hat and working the facing afterwards, I started with the facing. I cast on the same number of stitches as I’d planned for the hat, using the thinner yarn but on the same size needles as I’ll use for the hat, and I knit until my leftovers were almost gone, saving some for sewing the facing down later. (There’s actually another full ball of the stuff in my stash, but I didn’t want to dip into that. I can use it for other hats!)

With 3.25″ (just over 8cm) of facing knit, I switched to the Cascade 220 and knit one round in each shade of gray, then purled one round for a turning ridge, and then got started on the body of the hat with the corrugated ribbing.

While it looks as though that purl round is sticking out unattractively right now, it will create a spot in the knitting that just wants to fold inwards (because inside, it’s a recessed round of knit stitches amongst a sea of purls) and will create a nice firm edge at what will be the bottom of this hat, once the facing is folded up and sewn down.

If all goes according to plan (I estimated the gauge based on Michael’s hat, and I know how big my own head is, and I’m pretty sure this will fit… I hope…) I’ll have a double-warm hat with a triple-warm band around my ears. And if it comes out too big, then someone else will have a double-warm hat with a triple-warm brim. But I think it will work. Fingers crossed.