There’s a new color over at The Dye Pot.  As well as the color itself, it is named for the book (and now film) of one of my favorite writers - Neil Gaiman.  It’s called Coraline.

One of the issues I’m running into with the Do-it-Yourself Hat is this.  Just because I can make it up I go along, doesn’t mean I have to.  My own psychological make-up seems to mean that I go one way or the other with little or no middle ground.  Regarding these hats, that works out to mean either I come up with something new every time or feel mildly guilty about using a design or design element more than once.

Let’s just say that I know that’s pretty silly and that I am trying to remind myself that re-using a design element means that the element is successful - not that I’m lazy or unimaginative :)

The other side to this is that when I run across something I really like, I’m often tempted to write it down, capture and trap it into a much more regulation type of format - a pattern, in other words.  And this impulse slightly dismays me too because I do not want to spell things out where this pattern is concerned.  The whole idea in the first place was to set up a few general guidelines (and the fewer the better) so that anyone could plug in their own ideas and come up with anything at all.

All of that aside, the hat that fell off my needles this week pleased and greatly surprised me - probably because I almost frogged it a dozen times :)

The central panel is a pair of opposed twist six-stitch cables with a bobble between them done on the same row on which the cables are twisted.

I lovelovelove the look of cables turned on their sides - talk about a fresh perspective!  I mean, after a few seconds, it’s obvious what the trick is but when you first look at it, it looks like something wholly other.  There’s something almost architecturally satisfying in this and these sideways cable panels remind me of mouldings and Victorian gingerbread :)

Then I decided I wanted more cables and, knowing that they would pull the fabric in seriously, realized that I would probably need to pick up quite a few more stitches than I would if I were just going to go with garter or seed or regular ribbing.  I wound up with 144 stitches on my circular.  Really, when I had counted all that out a couple of times I hit the first you-should-frog-this(YSFT) point.  I kept thinking that couldn’t be right and, really, that was way too many stitches.  However my fingers, as though they had little minds of their own, had already worked twice around the circumference and were embarking on the first round of cable twists - 24 of them around the body of the hat.  Up to this point, I had been uncertain about whether these cables were for the brim part of the hat or for the body and I think it was about here that I finally decided they were definitely for the body.

So I built cables for a while and then decided to terminate half of them as well as getting going on the decreases.  For the first set (the shorter ones in the picture) I wound up doing the cable twist, doing a K2tog twice on the next round (they’re four-stitch cables) and a final K2togB on the round after that.  I rather fancy that the truncated cable looks somewhat candle-like and I was quite pleased with the result.

I went on, doing an additional decrease buried in the purl stitches, until the remaining 12 cables were as long as I wanted them to be, and decreased them away as well.  This time, I did the 2 K2togs before I did the cable twist and followed that, as before, with a K2togB on the subsequent round.  It was easier to manage and produced a slightly different (but still pleasantly candle-like) look.

After purling a couple rounds, I went back to stockinette and a more standard decrease mode.  I debated about adding a top-knot or a pom-pom or a tassel.  But it seemed to me that the hat had enough going on with all the panel and body cables, so I skipped the upper-story decoration, and finished things up with simple K2, P2 ribbing on the other side.

I feared that the hat would be enormous (given the number of stitches in its upper section), suitable for smuggling basketballs perhaps, but not really for wearing.  To my surprise, it didn’t turn out that way.  The hat is a perfectly ordinary ladies size medium though it is a bit heavier and more solid than an ordinary beanie or watch cap.

Now, let’s see if I can come up with another one before next Tuesday :)