Year of hats

I've been knitting for almost thirty years but I had never knit a hat until this year. I had a couple purchased hats but for unknown reasons didn't really wear them. And then last winter I got interested in a specific knitting technique -- twined knitting -- and pulled out *Homespun Handknit* for its twined hat by Meg Swansen.


The hat was fun to knit and the twined patterning is beautiful! It's super-warm and quite windproof but not very stretchy.

Then a couple months later I got interested in another technique -- Bavarian twisted stitch -- and knit the Proverbial Cap from an issue of Interweave Knits. Oddly enough this pattern is also by Meg Swansen.


This hat is really comfortable because of the stretchy nature of its all-rib pattern. It took me a while to get used to doing the twisted stitches and the charts almost drove me crazy. Each element has a different repeat so I never was able to settle into a rhythm. I would do this kind of knitting again, but I'd go for something simpler so I didn't have to keep looking at the charts.

Then in the last two weeks I knit three simple Fair Isle hats:


These were great fun. Each only took a couple days of easy knitting and I enjoyed the color patterning. I used the basic info on hat constuctions in Ann Budd's *Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns* and got most of the Fair Isle patterns from Alice Starmore's *Fair Isle Knitting.* The yarn is all leftovers except for the locally-produced cream colored wool from Marr Haven.