I’m almost done with the Mother’s Day Diagonal, I really am! I am decreasing at the top now. I haven’t even read the pattern from ChicKnits, mainly because my pattern is missing again. I have it printed up, and I keep putting it in my knitting basket, but it dissappears. My decreases are more influenced by the necessity of maintaining the diagonal pattern anyway, so I don’t really need it.

As much as I enjoy knitting hats, and I really do, I hate decreasing at the top. Probably because I never stay true to a pattern so I’m always winging it. Like right now, in fact. So many things can go wrong when you’re closing up a hat. If you wait too long, and then do it really fast, you get a flat top. If you drag the process out over too many rows, you get a conehead. How ’bout the one that has plagued me in the past, which is a combination of the two; I start working at one rate of decrease, realize it is either too fast, or too slow, and try to salvage my efforts by altering my method, part way through. The only way I can think to describe what results is to have you picture a conehead shaped object, (like say, a soft serve icecream cone), that was dropped on its point, and smooshed. Not pretty.

Finally, there is my most common error, which is to do a nice, perfeclty proportioned decrease at the top, but started a couple inches too soon, thus my really nice looking hat turns into a beanie.

For Christmas last year, I made Abigail’s kindergarten teacher a really cool hat. It was so cool, in fact, that I decided to make myself one immediately afterwards. (We’re at two hats now). With Christmas still being a few days away, and me really loving this cool hat I’d invented (or unvented, if you read Elizabeth Zimmerman), I decide to make one for each of the girls for a Christmas gift. One of the problems with being a stay home mom, and knitting gifts for your young children right before Christmas, is that you can only spend time knitting them while said children are asleep, when quite frankly, you should be asleep, too. Another, is not being able to try the gifty object on the intended recipient a hundred times during the shaping process. I spent hours and hours knitting my really cool hat five times in about as many days because, you know, there isn’t anything else to do right before Christmas. (That was sarcasm, in case it didn’t come through the screen and pinch you in the nose).

I ended up with three, really cute little beanies.

That last one is mine, modeled by Olivia. Veronica’s didn’t make it to the photo shoot, but hers is similar.

I love the stitch pattern. I love my hat. The hat for the teacher turned out really nice, too. But the hats for the little ones, I’m afraid, are beanies to an extent. Being the smart mommy that I am, I didn’t weave in the strings at the top so I could rip and redo if necessary, after trying them on the girls.

Yeah, six months later they are still beanies with stringies.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2004 at 1:11 am and is filed under knitting stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.