A Bit of Knit :: Winter Trails Hat

I was having trouble coming up with a name for this new series.  Should it be WIP Wednesday?  WIP means Work In Progress, which made a nice alliteration with Wednesday but I thought it was a little much with the other "day" blogs I do.  I worked through a lot of possibilities before I came up with "A Bit of Knit".  I made a list of things I'd like to accomplish this year and blogging a bit more regularly was one of them.  I'd done well last year until we hit October and mostly that was because I became too busy and then uninspired to blog.  So I've set up a schedule for myself, which somehow makes me feel obligated to blog.  I've also found that I haven't blogged much about my fiber addiction and that felt like a missing hole in this journal of my life.  So here we go!  I hope you enjoy it.


What I'm working on right now...The Winter Trails Hat in Madelinetosh Tosh Vintage, colorway Sea Salt.

I've made a few hats in my knitting career, some for me, some for family and friends, and mostly they've been the normal tube kind with maybe a cable or two.  My current favorite is this slouchy number that works with the cutest mini-skeins called Unicorn Tails from Madelinetosh.  I've made one for myself, one for Nicole's daughter Emily and am working on another for me.  But I've found something out about myself.  (On a side note -- I feel that suddenly realizing a preference or truth about yourself is the best part of being an adult.  The kind of realizations that don't rely on what other people think or what society says you should want, but what you truly want.  It's freeing somehow.  Okay, deep thought over.)  What I've found out is that I don't look good in those tube-y hats.  They look like....my head is too small for my body and I'm wearing a used, ummm c_ _ d _ m on my head. Seriously.  So I've changed my hat outlook.  I'm looking towards tams now.

A tam is also like a beret in the fact that it gets big right away but they are less stiff than a beret.  I'm looking for volume in a hat and a tam certainly has that.  Winter Trails isn't as slouchy as some tams, but I'm hoping it will look good.

I've also had to add stitches to this project because every hat I work on has too small of a diameter for my big noggin.  Whenever I manage to work out the math to add inches to my project I feel like I have a superpower.  So for this project the size said it fit 19-23 inch heads.  My head is 24 inches.  But it's a pretty cable heavy hat, so I needed to make sure that the increase was a whole repeat of the pattern.  The pattern was 26 stitches and the initial number of stitches to cast on was 100 stitches.  But there was two increase rounds to get to the 130 stitches needed for the body of the hat after knitting a knit 2, purl 2 ribbing.  So the numbers looked like this:

Cast on 100, increase to 125, increase to 130 for 5 repeats of a 26 stitch pattern.

So to add one more repeat of the pattern my final number needed to be 130+26=156.  So going backwards they added 5 stitches in the second increase, one for every pattern repeat.  I'd need 6, so my second number needed to be 150.  So now I had this:

Cast on ___, increase to 150, increase to 156 for 6 repeats of a 26 stitch pattern.

How many to cast on?  In that first row they worked 4 stitches per 1 stitch increase, so 150/5=30.  150-30=120.  My cast on number was 120.  Before I went ahead with that I needed to make sure it was divisible by 4 because of the knit 2, purl 2 ribbing.  120/4=30.  Perfect.  Math is my superpower!!!!!

And now to the knitting...