Another Three Days, Another Hat

I am challenged with the knitting of the chemo caps for my mum. She has an unusually small head, which is a fact that I never thought would cause me frustration. But the time has come. Her head is apparently so small that she also frustrated the woman at the wig centre, who had only one wig that would even fit her.

I've been trying to experiment with making the hats I'm knitting smaller than my head, but not too small. And I'm not so good at this. If my mother were a little closer than four hours away, I could use some trial and error and lots of ripping to get things just right. But, well, she's in Windsor and I'm in Port Credit and there's a lot of 401 between there and here.

So, for this latest hat, I tried to not only make the hat smaller, but also to make it adjustable in size a bit. I gave it a roll brim so that the height can be adjusted. And, in what I must admit turned out to be stupid luck, I added a row of simple lacy holes (yo, k2tog) just above the brim, to break up the straight knitting and give some character. Once I'd gotten a few rows past this section, it occurred to me that those holes could easily be threaded with something decorative. And this lead to this:



I did two strings of knotting with the same yarn used to knit the hat (pull the yarn through its own slip knot over and over), twisted them together, and threaded through the holes.

I really like the way it turned out. And the string makes it very easy to adjust the fit of the hat around the head.



And I think it looks cute. I hope Mum likes this one. I may even do the same kind of thing for myself, later. I will not, however, be using this yarn - though soft, it persisted in tangling and sticking to itself, in some kind of bizarre and frustrating self-felting fit.

Jen was kind enough to model the hat for me, saving me from an arm's length self-portrait or another dangerous cat modelling session.

Tomorrow I'm headed down to Windsor for the weekend. Better load enough podcasts onto the mp3 player to keep me awake on the 401.