Umbilical cord hat
May. 2nd, 2005 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thebratqueenOkay, here are the pictures of my little hat!
This is the umbilical cord hat from Stitch n Bitch. I picked it as my next project since I've got a niece or nephew on the way and I figured it would make a nice gift. It also seemed like a good next project because the pattern is pretty simple to follow.
I knit it up in my el cheapo practice yarn first because I figured if I was going to make mistakes or discover problems putting it together I'd rather do that with cheap yarn that I didn't care about. This proved to be very wise because I dropped stitches OMG!!
Basically the hat is knit in the round starting on 16 inch circular needles. You cast on, then do nothing but knit for about five inches worth of fabric. That part was no problem. The only difficulty there was joining the two ends together, and now that I have five inches worth of knitting in the round behind me I really do think my main problem was that I cast on too tightly. Next time I do this I'll use one of the suggested tips to make your casting on looser.
After five inches you switch to four dpn. Basically you place a stitch marker after every 8 stitches then knit 16 stitches off onto four needles (with one stitch marker in the middle of each 16). Then you slowly decrease by knitting everything except the last two stitches before the marker and at the end of the needle. Those two stitches you knit together.
All of which is very simple and easy in theory, and provides excellent practice with knitting in the round and working with dpn, both of which I'd never done before.
The catch is if you drop stitches, as I did. I'm not sure exactly when the stitches were dropped, but given the hard and pointy octopus that you have in your lap when you're working with five dpn at a time, my guess is that somewhere in there while I was moving from one needle to the next two stitches dropped off before I had a chance to make sure all of the stitches were hanging out safely in the middle of their respective needles. However it happened, two stitches fell and dropped down about three rows. Ack!
I was so glad to be doing this as a practice run then b/c if this had been the real deal I would have died. See, the catch here is that since I'd been decreasing for a while plus working with four dpn the concept of frogging the work to fix it was a pain in the ass. Even unknitting was too much to contemplate because keeping track of all the k2tog to remember what went where was also headache inducing.
Plus the idea of being so close to the end and having to start all over - ack!!
So I decided to take a chance and simply pick up the dropped stitches (luckily I have plenty of crochet hooks on hand), abandon all hope of figuring out what the stitches had been before they were dropped, and simply k2tog the dropped stitches plus any stitches around them until the needle in question had the same amount of stitches on it as all the other needles.
And... it worked! To my mind by all rights it shouldn't have since I feel like this should have messed up the shape or put loose, extra threads on the wrong side of the hat or something but as far as I can tell it didn't. I keep looking at the top of the hat and I can't tell which of the multiple lines of decreased stitches is the messed up one. Possibly it's not even in one of the lines and it's tucked under a crease or something. I can't tell. But the bonus is: I can't tell!
So now I've done it once to get a feel for how to make it, and I also know that if I mess up while doing the real deal it's possible to fix it. Huzzah!
I won't knit up the real deal until I have a chance to go to my LYS and get some nice yarn. But in the meanwhile I have this as a model. Plus I get to keep this one as a reminder of what I made =)
This is the umbilical cord hat from Stitch n Bitch. I picked it as my next project since I've got a niece or nephew on the way and I figured it would make a nice gift. It also seemed like a good next project because the pattern is pretty simple to follow.
I knit it up in my el cheapo practice yarn first because I figured if I was going to make mistakes or discover problems putting it together I'd rather do that with cheap yarn that I didn't care about. This proved to be very wise because I dropped stitches OMG!!
Basically the hat is knit in the round starting on 16 inch circular needles. You cast on, then do nothing but knit for about five inches worth of fabric. That part was no problem. The only difficulty there was joining the two ends together, and now that I have five inches worth of knitting in the round behind me I really do think my main problem was that I cast on too tightly. Next time I do this I'll use one of the suggested tips to make your casting on looser.
After five inches you switch to four dpn. Basically you place a stitch marker after every 8 stitches then knit 16 stitches off onto four needles (with one stitch marker in the middle of each 16). Then you slowly decrease by knitting everything except the last two stitches before the marker and at the end of the needle. Those two stitches you knit together.
All of which is very simple and easy in theory, and provides excellent practice with knitting in the round and working with dpn, both of which I'd never done before.
The catch is if you drop stitches, as I did. I'm not sure exactly when the stitches were dropped, but given the hard and pointy octopus that you have in your lap when you're working with five dpn at a time, my guess is that somewhere in there while I was moving from one needle to the next two stitches dropped off before I had a chance to make sure all of the stitches were hanging out safely in the middle of their respective needles. However it happened, two stitches fell and dropped down about three rows. Ack!
I was so glad to be doing this as a practice run then b/c if this had been the real deal I would have died. See, the catch here is that since I'd been decreasing for a while plus working with four dpn the concept of frogging the work to fix it was a pain in the ass. Even unknitting was too much to contemplate because keeping track of all the k2tog to remember what went where was also headache inducing.
Plus the idea of being so close to the end and having to start all over - ack!!
So I decided to take a chance and simply pick up the dropped stitches (luckily I have plenty of crochet hooks on hand), abandon all hope of figuring out what the stitches had been before they were dropped, and simply k2tog the dropped stitches plus any stitches around them until the needle in question had the same amount of stitches on it as all the other needles.
And... it worked! To my mind by all rights it shouldn't have since I feel like this should have messed up the shape or put loose, extra threads on the wrong side of the hat or something but as far as I can tell it didn't. I keep looking at the top of the hat and I can't tell which of the multiple lines of decreased stitches is the messed up one. Possibly it's not even in one of the lines and it's tucked under a crease or something. I can't tell. But the bonus is: I can't tell!
So now I've done it once to get a feel for how to make it, and I also know that if I mess up while doing the real deal it's possible to fix it. Huzzah!
I won't knit up the real deal until I have a chance to go to my LYS and get some nice yarn. But in the meanwhile I have this as a model. Plus I get to keep this one as a reminder of what I made =)
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Umbilical cord hat 1 I tried to get Luna to wear it for a photo but she wasn't agreeable. Anyway, here's a view of the hat head-on. |
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Umbilical cord hat 2 Here it is at a slight tilt so you can see the top better. |
