A Warm Hat for Simon

Having been recently reacquainted with knitting, it was first my intention to knit a hat for Simon. At the craft store Simon picked out a beautiful multi-colored woolen yarn and I grabbed a set of circular knitting needles- something I had never used before. When I got home and attempted my cast on, I had problems. How the heck do you use these things? Well a word to the wise, I now know that you always use a length that will be shorter than  the circumference of what you will be knitting. So since I surely wasn’t going to make a hat as wide as 29″ (the length I bought), I decided to stow those away for another project and I whipped out my trusty crochet hook.

A couple days later it was almost done, or so I thought. The only thing I needed to do was to line it with fleece. But it must have shrunk over night or something because the next day it seemed smaller and tighter on Simon’s head. The next day even more so! So much so that Simon decided it wasn’t his hat anymore and I would have to make him a new one; he fully rejected the hat I made for him!

So I put the hat aside for a few days. Maybe it would fit Gabriel? I was still determined to finish it as I had planned. Truly there is nothing worse than having a bunch of unfinished projects haunting you. So the next time I went to the fabric store I picked up some fleece.

When I came back to the project I carefully inspected the hat. Was it really too small? I tried it on my head and it was a bit short. Hats are really uncomfortable unless they are comfortable. I know that sounds obvious but it is really true. Being slightly short, this one felt like it was constantly riding up. Besides that, the wool was pretty darn itchy. Too factors that made it a total failure.

Yet both of those issues could be remedied. So I made the hat longer by adding more rows of crochet and I also made it waaaay softer by lining it with the fleece as I had originally planned. I even added a fancy tassel to finish it off.

…what? You want the hat back? Yay!