Eskimimi Knits knitting blog

A few months after I started knitting I decided that I wanted to knit Craig a hat that he’d love to wear. I wanted it to be warm and functional, but made of very comfortable yarn and also be something that Craig enjoyed wearing, and I wanted to be able to give it to him for his birthday no, it was for Christmas a few months earlier.

One of our favourite films is Wes Anderon’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, an homage of sorts to Jacques Cousteau Starring one of my absolute favourite actors, Bill Murray. In the film the Ocenographer and documentary maker Zissou, and the crew of the submarine Belefonte all wear red hats of many forms. One Sikh crew member wears a red turban whilst the other members of the crew wear varying style of woolly hats and watch caps, but all in the same bright red.

"Look! I can see that shop that sells all those red hats!"

I decided to try and knit a simple ribbed hat with a deep folded brim to keep the ears extra warm in the cold Lancastrian weather. I decided it should be made with extremely comfortable yarn so that it didn’t make the forehead itch and so would be enjoyable to wear.

Also, it should be a Life Aquatic hat. Those who like great movies would know, to everyone else it is just a hat.

The key is in the embellishment

Craig loves his simple, knitted Christmas gift and wears it all of the time. He has a few hats, but when he asks for ‘his hat’ I know which one he means. It’s probably one of the simplest things I have knit, but perhaps the most effective. Sometimes we see people double-take when they see his hat, either half-remembering it or realising where they’ve seen something similar, and I hope a little picture of Bill Murray flashes up in their mind.

The hat is wearing well, and looks like the day it was made, even though in the winter months it is worn almost daily, and still makes one or two passers-by smile when they suddenly realise where they’ve seen that hat before.

Click here to see other blogs tagged with knitcroblo6, blogging about this same topic for Knitting and Crochet Blog week. (May take a few hours to update on Google)

So, the continuing saga of the Blue Winter hat…

Yesterday, I bundled the hat into a box containing a few items such as my camera, etc, and hid it away in my suitcase. When looking through this same box this morning the hat was gone. Did I not love it enough, causing the knitting gnomes to steal it away as I slept? Cue increasing hurried and desperate attempts to locate missing knitwear for nearly two hours until it turned up under a box in the wardrobe.

Rescued.

The sweet relief of finding the hat again after such a scare of course means that I love this hat more than anything, because I couldn’t bare to lose something that took me so long to make. I don’t know how well the blue colour suits me, yet. Blue is just a colour that doesn’t seem to feature in my wardrobe, so I am slightly uncomfortable with the unfamiliarity of the tone of this otherwise beautiful chapeau, so this may well turn into a gift in the future. I’m just not sure if the colour suits me yet.

The Blue Winter hat is gathering pace as it approaches the finishing post.  Despite being a nice, simple hat, this project represents a few minor firsts for me.  For a start, I never knit with, or wear, blue.  So, why did I buy this yarn?  It was really cheap in a local closing down sale

Secondly, I have never knit a slouchy hat, and I keep worrying at the prodigious length that this hat has reached already.  I can put the hat on, draw the needle through and cinch the top, and it fits fine – but I am going to press on with the remaining one and a half repeats of the charted pattern, because I’d like to add a new shaped hat to my winter wardrobe.

I'm going to carry on and embrace the slouch.

Thirdly, twisted stitches – how have I just discovered thee?  Well, that’s not quite accurate – I knew that they existed and the thinking behind them, but have never before used them.  I wonder how they compare in look, function and ease of completion with simple 2 stitch cables, made without a cable needle?  If I have any remnants from the project and experiment may be in order.

I’ve knit with Rowan Pure Wool Dk several times before, and always found it a nice, basic yarn, but I do seem to have a lot of problems with pilling as I knit.  Though it seems to wear pretty well,  I often find fuzzy bits working their way off of the yarn before I even reach them with my needle, and a close-up detail of the brim shows the slight problem:

take a close look at the very edge of the brim

So, that’ll be one for the old clothes de-fuzzer once it’s complete.

I’m looking forward to getting this finished and piling all of my hair inside it on bad hair days (sure to be especially frequent during the blustery March ahead).  Let’s just hope that blue doesn’t look terrible on me…

‘The time has come’, Eskimimi said,
‘To think of other things:
Of hats and wool and stitch patterns
And whether you’ve actually checked the ball-band correctly to see if you have enough yarn to finish what you are knitting”.

Your Honour, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, I admit that I have made a mistake.  A stupid, basic, knitting noob mistake.  I present to you exhibit A.  The ball band from a skein of Rowan Pure Wool DK yarn.  Please observe where it says there are 175m per ball:

Sorry? There is a problem with my evidence for the defence?

Sorry? Let me check… Yes, your honour, you’re right.  I don’t know why I thought that two was a seven.  Yes, yes, each ball is 50m shorter than I had thought.  

To further my case for the defence I would suggest that I was perhaps distracted into misreading the lenght length by the mis-spelling on the ball-band, which clearly draws the eye away from the numerical values.  No, no, wait!  I’m not guilty!

They say that there is no such thing as a victimless crime, and weeping in the stands we find the beautiful Golden Autumn hat, by the beautiful and talented Lucy Sweetland of A Black Pepper.

'What did I do to deserve this? I feel so incomplete!'

Yes, your honour, I am ready for my sentence.

A 2-4 day wait and a fine of £4.70, plus some possible inconsistencies in dye-lot?  Community service to be performed at the Bay of E?  Nooooooooo!

Baby's first comedy Santa hat

I had no idea what I was going to make when I stared knitting this.  Made from the remnants of an un-ravelled hot water bottle cover that I was knitting earlier in the year I thought I could get away with knitting something for my 6 month old niece purely on the basis that it was pink, and a walk past Mothercare a few weeks ago seemed to suggest that pink was ‘in’ for baby girls, just like every other year…

I had very little yarn to make this with, but experience has taught me that babies tend to be smaller then other human beings, so I thought I could still squeeze a whole but very small project out of the tangled mass of candy floss yarn that I had gathered.  I settled on the idea of a pink santa hat, complete with loopy fringing and a magnificent loopy bobble:

You want to squeeze it, don't you? Oh, go on then...

It’s a simple hat, and made primarily for novelty purposes (I am hoping that my sister will be able to capture a few cute pictures over the Christmas period), but then maybe it isn’t too obviously a santa hat to be worn at other times.  That decision up to my rather picky sister.

Baby's 1st christmas

Marram

Here is my latest pattern, ‘Marram’.  Featuring spiralling slipped stitches and a secondary spiral of stepped colour changes in thin, graphical stripes. I have been wearing this hat, knit in a blend of warm alpaca, merino, and even a touch of silk, quite a lot over the last week or so, now that the temperature has dipped into a cold that bites just a bit harder, but here it is warming the head of my other half. I wanted to show how suited I thought it was to a man as well as to a woman, especially in the season of knitted gifts when sometimes it is a little harder to find small knitted items for male recipients that have interesting aesthetics as well as an engaging but quick project.

"look over there, it's the Goodyear blimp!"

After I managed to trick Craig in taking part in a spontaneous photoshoot I had to settle upon a name, as the pattern was written up and ready to go.

The name ‘Marram’ came from my last blog post where I asked if folks might have any suggestions over what I might call this hat.  I was actually quite surprised by the number of kind and thoughtful responses.  There were a few I have to admit that I had to google: ‘Sphagnopsida’ and ‘Sphagnum’, both meaning a type of peat moss from what I gathered, and very apt given the mossy appearance of the hat as had been noted, but they also kept making me think of bolognese.  A few suggestions based on the spiralling design: ‘Fibonacci’ (another I need to check the spelling of) and ‘Ammonite’.

Craig’s favourite was not a comment left in suggestion of a name, but rather a very kind response to the hat itself by Jane – ‘Great hat!’.  Craig actually suggested I call it ‘Great Hat!’, which, though cute and funny, I didn’t have the nerve to do.  For one it sets a dangerous precedent.  Clearly my next hat would have to be ‘better’ than the Great Hat, otherwise it would be the ‘Not-So-Great Hat’, or the ‘Well, It’s OK Hat’.  If the next hat was to be better, it would then have to be the ‘Even Greater Hat’, and the following one the ‘Best Hat Yet!’, and then where would my lack of modesty take me?  So I had a look at the other suggestions: ‘Sea Grass’, which  could imagine spiralling in the movement of the water, and finally ‘Marram’.  Similar to the Sea Grass suggestion, I could imagine the curving lines of long grass blades, and it seemed to fit perfect.

Marram Grass

Also, it is of course a palindrome, which scores extra points as I am a nerd. These few lines of poetry seal the deal:

The spiked marram’s springy knitting-needles
Purl and entangle what concrete cannot conquer
And the green holds back the brown.

From ‘The Rock-Face’ by Norman Nicholson

Thankyou to Linda for the suggestion, and to everyone else who took tome to comment and give me suggestions when I lost inspiration.

Download the PDF for the Marram Hat

Untitiled, for now

I’m hoping that someone might be able to help me out of a quandary. I can’t seem settle upon a name for this hat.  It is always the first thing I decide upon when writing out a new pattern as it helps to confirm the character of the knitted object (if articles of knitwear can have character), but I am having troubles with this new design.  My first thoughts were that it reminded me of moss, probably because of the colour, and this was confirmed when I stepped in the lift with my other half last week and he said ‘oh, your new hat looks good on, it reminds me of moss’ (I tried not to take this to mean that I must have a face reminiscent of a boulder).

When I was later thinking about writing the pattern up I wondered about the two names ‘Geology’ and ‘Palaeontology’.  ’Geology’ as the slip stitch pattern and broken lines of the stripes reminded me of layers rock strata that had come under stress and fractured, and ‘Palaeontology’ as I have a version of the hat planned with an embellishment, knit in an increasing spiral in garter stitch, something like an ammonite:

idea for an ammonite-like spiral embellishment

But I’m really not sure if either of these ideas are ‘right’.  Maybe I am just feeling uninspired these last few days.  I’ve been frustrated with the lack of light when I have tried to take photos, the absence of a helpful volunteer head to model the hat (or useful tripod for self-modelling), so maybe it is because I wanted to get the pattern written up and photographed properly.  As such the pictures I have at the moment are of a hat still awaiting a head.

I also love the very top of the hat:

detailing the decreases

It was, at the very least, challenging to work out a method of decreasing whilst maintaining the spiralling pattern of the slipped stitches and broken stripes, but once I figured out a formula I was delighted with the way that the two forms of diagonal patterning intersected and created the radiating pattern on the top of the hat.

So, with that in mind I am stuck, so if anyone reading this post happens to have any flashes of inspiration, please, please, please suggest away, and hopefully I’ll be able to find the motivation and inspiration to write up this pattern for the weekend.

When presenting myself with the question what can I make with just 35g of RYC Baby Alpaca DK? I decided to somehow try and combine it with 45g of RYC Silk Wool DK to make a more substantial project. I had a feeling that if I was careful I could make it stretch to a hat with perhaps enough left over for some kind of embellishment.  ’Stripes’ were suggested early on by Smashing Puffin, and I thought this a fantastic suggestion as a subtle but eye-catching design could be made with the slightly different green tones and the contrasting textures.  Also, it was obvious that whatever was going to be knit with these two yarns it was going to feel gorgeous.

I decided to knit a simple, skinny striped hat (single alternating rows of colour), with a few slipped stitches to add interest and an almost graphical, if not quite geometric, patterning to the hat.  An almost blanket covering of rainclouds during my last two days in Lancaster have meant that I haven’t been able to get a good photograph of the now completed hat, but here is a detail until I can play at being David Bailey:

Warm and squishy, like a good hat should be.

Though I knit this for myself, the very subtle colour variations and gentle spiralling of the slipped stitches make me hopeful that most men would also be happy to wear a hat such as this, in what I hope is a slightly more attractive manifestation of the 1980’s idea of ‘unisex’, and I may try and knit a cute embellishment with the small remnants to make the most out of these gorgeous yarns and add some interest for an even more feminine knit.  I kept comprehensive notes as I was knitting (especially during the fun decrease rounds, which were difficult to work out but which I love now they are complete) so I am gong to try and write up the pattern when I have a spare moment or two.