The LISTEN hatâ„¢ saga continues. Here is my first prototype, which I am about to frog.

It ended up becoming awfully busy, as my child’s-painting approach to the exciting colours overwhelmed me and I decided to use ALL the colours, in very close proximity to one another, and in an ill-conceived dog’s dinner of a design.

I have forgiven myself for this gaudy excessiveness, but it is time now to rip out the hat and to assemble all the lessons learned from this experience into a new pattern.

The first thing to take away from the experience is that Liz’s amazing comment re: using the pixels of letters in order to chart letters turned out to be spot on. I am very happy with the actual letters spelling LISTEN across the hat and can confirm that Liz’s charting tip works a treat! I am not sure if other knitters charting letters work in this way** but it was very helpful to me to use this technique and I shall use it in all future instances where a specific typeface is required in a fairisle project.

Secondly, a square method of decreasing at the crown of the hat has resulted in a most unpleasing shape. I realise I want now to decrease by 6 sts every 2 rows rather than 8 sts every 2 rows, both to make the crown longer, and to result in curvier lines.

Thirdly, the ridiculous method I employed for the earflaps*** is not nearly so neat and efficient as a short-row construction would have been. Brenda pointed this out to me when I stayed with her and she is absolutely right. In hat #2 I shall create 2 little earflaps using the same short-row construction that I use for toes and heels in socks, only pointier and more earflap-shaped.

In terms of colours… well, my inner six-year-old absolutely hates to admit it, but this hat really doesn’t need to include 8 different colours. Although I liked the striped letters in the chart, they lose their impact in reality. This could be because I have also striped the background? In hat #2 I shall stripe only one element, and not everything.

Although in truth is is difficult to really get perspective on how they look with my bogbean (green) and pebblebeach (grey, yellow, pink) ‘soundwave’**** design popping rudely out of the background…

So now I shall spend a couple of hours of ripping out and re-skeining that wool, steaming it and leaving it to dry, and considering more carefully my treasured stash of Starmore yarns, for future incarnations of this project.

To learning!

*For those interested, it is Hit the Road, one of my favourite sans-serif typefaces.
**I saw that the beautiful Abecedarium by Susette Newbury features in the Spring/Summer edition of Twist!
***For those interested, I created the earflaps by knitting triangles, where I increased with YOs at each end. I made 2 such triangles for each earflap and then grafted them on to the lining and the outer section of the hat, with the intention of picking up the YOs together, to add an i-cord binding and tie at the bottom. Confused? So was I.
****Don’t worry if you too also couldn’t see that the dribbly line of green colours placed above the word LISTEN was meant to look like a soundwave; it doesn’t look like one to me either.