Puckered Pirates

Okay, so I'm getting pretty good at fair isle using the two-handed technique on patterns that don't include long runs.

Unfortunately, the skull-and-crossbones motif in the hat I'm currently knitting required twists, so I abandoned the two-handed technique a bit (sort of like now, when I use a knife and fork, sometimes I switch my fork to the right hand and use it like a shovel, even though I was taught very properly to always hold the fork in my left hand and push the food onto the back of the fork with my knife).



So anyway, as a result of my improvised changes to my fair isle knitting technique, I have ended up with puckered pirates. I guess it doesn't really matter, though, because that's the not the worst thing about the latest hat I'm working on. The worst thing is that it's turning out too small.

For some reason I convinced myself that because my dad is small (by which I mean he is trim and well-proportioned) he must need a small hat. So I made the smaller size given on the pattern. Turns out, I think, that it's a child's size (which, in retrospect, I should have known). Crap!

By the way, if you compare my hat to Gretchen's (whose pirate modifications I am using), you can see where I added rows, one for the increases I forgot to do, and one more for symmetry below the row where I did the decreases.*

Luckily this hat is a really quick knit. But still. This was the yarn I had reserved for my dad's hat. Now I have to use different yarn to make one that fits him. Sigh.

But the good news is that at the Knit & Chat on Friday morning I finished up two projects that I'd had on the go for a while. (In the case of the Noro Beehive hat, a very long while). So yes, the Noro hat for my husband is finished, and it fits him. But I got my son to model it for this photo.



All you good knitters, don't look too closely at it, because this one was totally improvised towards the end (and it shows).

But anyway, while I had my son in a modelling mood, I stuck the other fair isle on his head and made him pose with that too. He insisted that the cat must be in this photo with him. She is not really as fat as this photo makes her look, by the way, and her eyes are even more stunning than the photo shows.



Also, when I use the flash on photos of my son, he always has droopy eyes. It's something to do with the timing of the camera. It always catches him mid-blink.

Oh, and while we're on the topic of people modelling hats I have knitted, here is the recipient of another hat I knitted too small, my Better Bucket hat. Isn't she adorable? I'm so glad her mom gave me permission to post the photo.


(Hat designed by Amy M. Swenson. Free pattern available here.)

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* Actually, if you look closely at my pirate hat you will notice something that I wasn't aware of before. Gretchen's instructions reverse the chart from the hat she knitted. Her chart has the pattern knitted in the contrast colour, with Noro as the background. Her hat has Noro skulls. Hmmm.