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Thursday, June 24, 2010
FO Feature: Buttercup Beret
I love making hats. Hats are easy to make. They don’t take very long – even the more complicated ones – and they require very little work to make them wearable after they’re finished. There’s also just something cool about creating a head-shaped object with knits and purls. Knitting still fascinates me when I think about it in terms of its inherent simplicity. Considering how much I love hats, though, I need another one like I need a hole in my head. Since I picked up knitting again over a year ago, I have made twelve hats (thirteen if you count the one I had to rip out because it wouldn’t fit anybody I know – even Johnathan). Eight of them have been for me. Eight! Well, make that nine, because I ended up with a lot of extra yarn after making my Grove mittens, and decided that I needed to make something to go with them. Enter the Buttercup Beret.
I have had this pattern favorited for a while, and it was the only thing that I could see coordinating with the Grove pattern, which required the yardage that I had, was free, and was at least sort-of fitting with the style of the mittens. I probably could have made up a hat to go with the grove pattern, but I didn’t want to get into designing when it comes to hats. I’ll stick to scarves for now.
I started the hat on Monday. I must have cast it on about ten times that day, with my last attempt garnering me a fairly uneven cast on of 95 stitches. I needed 96. So I started over on Tuesday. I got the right number of stitches cast on the first time, and it didn’t look like crap! Hurrah! So I started the brim.
K1, P1, K1, P1. I got two rows into the pattern before I realized that I was not knitting, I was knitting through the back loop, which produces a different kind of stitch than a regular knit. Oh well, I’ve decided to say that’s a custom design element, meant to go with the twisted stitches on the mittens. Now it coordinates! Totally planned, I swear.
The rest of the hat was a trial at best. Not because the pattern was bad, because it wasn’t. I just couldn’t seem to pay enough attention to it to do it right the first time. I would knit two rows, realize I had done something wrong, then go back to fix it. This went on for almost the entire duration of the hat. On Saturday night, I was finishing with it, and by the time I got done, I realized that my decreases had somehow gone wrong. I ended up with twenty stitches when I ought to have had sixteen. Well, crap. So I just did a ssk, k2tog around and finished with ten stitches. That was good enough for me, and threaded the yarn through the remaining stitches and called it done.
There really was only one problem when I finished. It neither looked nor fit like a beret. I know that the Swish yarn from Knit Picks relaxes a lot when it’s washed, but I did not expect it to relax quite that much. I washed it anyway, and pulled out a plate to see what would happen. Much to my surprise, the hat fit over the full-size plate! I guess it was going to be a beret after all.
After blocking, the hat was definitely a beret. It’s not a very floppy or loose one, and it stays fairly close to my head, but it’s definitely not a beanie anymore. I love how it turned out, even with all of my mistakes.
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