A Hat Big Enough

My husband is someone whose head size is larger than the average. He has a hard time finding hats to fit. He recently, came down stairs so proudly saying, “I just found a web-site where I can order an extra large hat.” After hearing that, I was humbled into finally beginning a knit hat that would fit his head.

Just before Christmas I downloaded Brooklyntweed’s “Turn A Square” free hat pattern. Thank you, Jared! I thought this would be a fun hat to knit and would be manly enough for my hubbie to wear. I spoke with my friend Ellen who makes recycled cashmere yarn. She had just dropped some nice gray colored yarn for sale at one of our local yarn stores. I dashed over to “Ewe’ll Love It!” and made my purchase. I proceeded to visit several other stores in search of accompanying contrasting stripe colors.

For such a simple looking hat there were some technical challenges to completing a good looking result. This hat is knit in the round on circular needles where stripes appear with steps at the color changes. To avoid these stepped stripes, I used the jogless stripe knit technique found here on the techknitting blogspot: techknitting blogspot. I wish I understood there was such a simple solution sooner. I could have used this technique earlier in my two-stranded knitting.

I didn’t finish this in time for a Christmas gift but started right afterwards. This way I got a chance to use part of my new gift of Knitpick's Interchangeable Harmony Wood Circular Needles. Instead of using double pointed needles at the close of the hat top, I used two circular needles (see photo). To make the stitches slide easily from the left side needle to the right I used one needle size smaller on the left needle connection.

I did run into some problems with this knit design. I didn’t see other commenting on this on Ravelry, so, it could just be the way I knit. I found I was creating a rather large gap where the “corner” raglan style decrease was occurring in my knitting (see photo). As I noticed the effect starting a few rows up I tried to minimize the gap. I found it helped to knit tightly in the area one row prior to the decrease area. It helped but, I still came back and ran a few tightening stitches through the loops on the backside of the knitted fabric at the raglan decrease line (see photo).