unexpected hats

I don't have any new knitting to show you. I'm a little further along on my Kroy sock but it still looks the same, just longer. But I have edited several more hat patterns and plan to send a bunch of them to my pattern checker by the end of the week. I started with the easier hats. And now I'm into the more complex hats. There are a couple of things which have come up that I didn't quite expect. At least I expected things to crop up that I hadn't thought out, I just didn't know which things they would be.

Alana knit a lovely hat knit in chunky wool which starts at the top with the I-cord tail. That's fine and it works really well. But ... here it is, all the hats in this booklet are written so you can use any yarn, from sock yarn to chunky weight yarn. The cable is worked by casting on 12 sts, 3 in blue, 6 in yellow, 3 more stitches in blue and working the cable sideways to the hat, attaching this border to the hat using a K2tog. That's terrific and it makes a wonderful hat. But then we compared it to the same hat knit in DK weight yarn and realized that 12 stitches for the cable border knit in chunky measures about 2" wide but in DK wool the same cabled border measures just over an inch wide.

So now we have to work out the length of the body of the hat not only for the size of hat (a Newborn hat being much shallower than an Adult Large size) but we also must compensate for the weight of yarn chosen. Your newborn hat could be in chunky wool and you could knit a large adult hat in DK. We could have played with the number of stitches for the border but that makes the pattern more complicated and still requires compensation for yarn used. Interesting! On a larger hat in sock wool the cable will look like rope around the bottom edge, a pretty cool look I think.
I'm moving onward to a lace hat, a fairisle hat and then, ta da, hats with flaps. That's when it gets really interesting. Yay! Lots of fun to come.

-deb