Hats hats hats

My knitting always seems to be out of kilter with the seasons (or maybe I'm just a citizen of the Global South stuck north of the equator?). Right now there is a lot of hat knitting going on. If you watch the Fruity Knitting podcast on YouTube (which really should be called a vodcast), maybe you saw the recent interview with hat designer Woolly Wormhead in episode 75? I love learning more about a person who has gone ALL IN on a thing, and with Woolly, that thing is hats. Respect. I recommend the episode, especially the "hat clinic" segment that begins at about 23 minutes in. In it, Woolly talks about different head shapes and the hats that will flatter them.

Watching this made me excited about knitting hats, so I decided to join the Fruity Knitting #WoollyWormheadKAL. I got yarn at MDSW to make two hats and the first one is one the needles. It is made in fingering weight yarn - I'm using this gorgeous hand painted colorway called "Starfish":

It takes a while to make a hat out of fingering yarn, but who can complain when it's this pretty? The beginning of this hat was difficult, though. You do a provisional CO with waste yarn, then knit five stockinette rounds, and then knit together the provisional loops and the live loops (kind of like a tubular CO). I wish I had seen this beforehand, as I think it would have been easier than doing the provisional CO on waste yarn. At first I thought it would take FOREVER to work 6 tucks, but I developed a rhythm and an eye for where to pick up stitches, and I got faster as I went on. Can you see the tucks? I actually thought the brim was garter stitch when I bought the pattern - what a surprise!

Once past this fussy brim, the rest of the hat is quite easy. The brim is a lot thicker than the rest of the hat, though, which will be welcome on my forehead in cold weather.

In other hat news, have you heard about the #HatNotHate initiative? They are collecting blue handknit hats to distribute to kids as part of an anti-bullying campaign. That seems like a good stashbuster. I dove into my stash and learned that I have no blue yarn in hat quantity that is suitable for this. Then I flashed on the helix hat approach, which makes good use of scraps to make single row stripes. I was able to whip out these 3 hats, mostly during a conference:

Each is made with 3 colors. Because hats are knit in the round (which is really a spiral), there are no jogs. Just like a candy cane has jogless stripes! Here is a place where a stripe begins - can you see it just above the ribbing?

Some other knitters in my knitting group have made hats, too - here are mine with two versions of Vegamot, one of my favorite hat patterns (and free!). 

There is at least one more hat coming from my group, but we'll get these into the mail soon.