Finished my husbands Hat!

Here are some nice photos of the finished hat. My niece Nili is the model. As you can see the hat is a bit large for her.

Nili has been visiting for a few days. Its been fun coming home from work and chatting. We would pour a glass of wine, break out the chips and dip and catch up.

I'm teaching her how to "blog" so she can pass along the skill to her family.

A few years ago I taught my sister to blog and now she blogs way more than I do. She also uses blogs for her classes. In case you want to see my sister's web log about boat building and restoration.http://www.greenboats.blogspot.com/

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).

Band Costume Design

I helped my daughter’s middle school theater with their costumes for the performance of “Barnum”. We collected circus costumes and 1870’s clothes, and we found that we needed fourteen 1890’s band costumes. Well, I took on the project. I found a good web site with lots of old time band pictures. (http://www.ibew.org.uk/vbbp-us1.htm)(Mostly men, I guess women weren’t allowed out in public back then. At least not as a band member.)

At first I was hoping that the students would not wear hats since our budget was limited. But, after looking into all the old band pictures; almost every band has caps on their heads. The style I that thought would be appropriate (conductor style) are hard to find. Because of that my daughter and I thought to create them from an inexpensive top hat. It’s really Nomi’s design. She worked on them slowly but surely finished.

For the actual, band jacket I altered a short styled women’s stand-up collar jacket. I added the extra Triangle shape flap for band “flare”. This is where we added the trim straight across the chest with buttons on the ends. Michael's craft supply store sells a mix of gold buttons so we mixed and matched the buttons to the front.

Our costume committee members helped to cut out the jacket pieces. We distributed the cut pieces out to two different mothers who also helped to sew them up.
So here you see the final results on the students. Hurrah! Come follow the band!