Sunday, October 5, 2008

Turn a Square (Badly)

I am still on my "making home made pressies" crusade. Step Dads birthday is next month so I thought I would make him a beanie hat, instead of sending, for yet another year , boring socks and undies!! (Why are male relatives so hard to buy for?)

I am a big fan of Brooklyn Tweed (who isn't??!!) so decided to try one of his patterns - Turn a Square. I have some Noro Kureyon that I thought would work well for the contrast colour that changes hue as you go up the hat. The black is something nameless in my stash.

Turn a square

It's bright isn't it? Not sure if it is really Step Dad's style but I figure his wardrobe could do with some brightening up hehe. I just love the raglan decreases and the "square" that develops
Turn a square

The pattern is a great one for practicing jogless stripes in the round, something I've tried once before and failed at miserably. However this time I did a lot better....not perfect but I think I've got it sussed now. You can see where they are if you look hard but I think once blocked they'd be much less obvious
Jogless stripes


So at this point you would think I would be pretty stoked that I have finished the present a whole month EARLY!! and crossed another home made pressie off the list.

Hmmmm well no, not really. Unfortunately I won't be sending the beanie off any time soon, the only place it will be going is the frog pond.

DH wouldn't oblige me with some hat modelling but he did take the pics, and you can see that on me the hat is a little big. Sadly its also too big on DH's big man head too! Way too big.

Did I check tension? No. Was I totally stupid to decide that nameless black yarn was DK and my needles were 4mm (not 4.5mm called for in pattern) and therefore I should cast on more stitches? Totally stupid. And *even worse* when the pattern says knit for 5 inches, I decide that looks too short and I should add AN INCH!! before decreasing? Yup that dumb. It baffles me now that I thought I would know better than *Jared Flood*. End result? Big huge hat that's way too wide and too long. My gauge was spot on so perhaps if I had checked that and actually followed the perfect pattern I would have a gift worthy hat right now! I'd like to say I've learnt my lesson but you know....

Truth be told I'm feeling a bit sorry for the Noro right now. You might remember big huge glove (notice a theme?) that I knit in Noro awhile back - I frogged it to reclaim the yarn for this hat, which is about to be frogged. I seem to be having a bad run with it. Let's hope 3rd time lucky!

11 comments:

Unknown said...

It is cute, though! A good site with a couple of techniques for colour change in the round is:
http://techknitting.blogspot.com/2007/01/jogless-stripes.html

oacemama said...

What a shame...it is a cool looking hat. I must admit that me and NoroKureyon don't have a good thing going either...it just knits up so differently in tension to everything else i use...it is bizarre!

Fi said...

Aww - that is a great hat! I made this exact hat for my associate 2w ago, and he loved it. I made mine using Noro CashIroha and Kureyon, and it was cool.
I too thought that the measurements sounded weird, but thankfully I followed the pattern.
The jogs do come out with blocking.

Do the hat again - its great! Or maybe look at the fake isle hat? I did that first, and then frogged the whole thing cause my floats were too tight.....

Anonymous said...

ok, but at least you got that stripe thing down. impressive.

Anonymous said...

The hat looks great--love the color combo. Are you going to reknit it? What about washing it to see if it shrinks up a little? I recently knit two accidentally XL hats, so I know the feeling!

Anonymous said...

But you got good practise for your jogless joins! I'd knit it again if I were you. In fact, I've got lots of odd balls of Kureyon so may just try it myself too.

hanna said...

I love that hat, what a shame it's too big!

Anonymous said...

I LOVE that hat. WIll you re-knit another one for the gift, or organise something different?

sweetp said...

Thinking I will reknit it (properly this time) but maybe not for a few weeks lol

Mary said...

Awww, that is to bad...lovely colors though and you did learn a new technique, so not all was lost!

Anonymous said...

It does look gorgeous though - it reminds me of those pictures I used to do as a child, where you paint bright colours, cover the page with black wax crayon, and then scrape off the crayon to reveal the colours underneath.