I was having a chat with my friend at work recently, he was telling me about a hat he wanted and asked me whether or not I would be able to make one. I've never tried out following a pattern which involved shaping before so whilst I said yes definitely... I was secretly wondering what I'd let myself in for. If I thought that was hard enough I had to incorporate my own intarsia design too in order to give it a christmassy feel.
I started off creating the rib stitich, this was the easy bit and the rim of the hat was soon finished, now onto the hard part... I drew out the design I wanted to make onto squared paper and tried to fit the shaping around it. Suprisingly this started off well, the snowman was actually looking like a snowman!
But then came reducing the stitches. I had to K10 and then K2tog repeating this across the row, this was fine where the knit was plain but when the next 10th stitch landed on my design I thought I was in trouble! Knitting two stitches together on the picture would make it look distorted so I had to find a way to avoid this and thankfully I was successful, I realised I could do it either side of the picture as long as I made up for the stitches added the next time. So for example, I would have to K14 instead to avoid knitting stitches together on the snowman so once I was past it I K2tog and would only K6 the next time. It's hard to describe but it makes sense in my head and the results showed it to work...
I really like it, I think it needs some fine tuning to bring the snowflakes closer to the snowman but that's why I did this tester to figure out what I'd need to do to make it perfect. I quite like the colours as well, this is only in DK acrylic so not the most luxurious of materials! But I thought with it being a tester there's no point in wasting good wool.
I think I'm going to try out a few more of these in different designs and get them on my ETSY shop, so if anyone wants a kitsch holiday hat, give me an email at samwilson1991@live.co.uk
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