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Monday 10 December 2007

not everything works out as planned....


when I came home from a visit to wales in october 06 I was very keen to start knitting with the three skeins of alpaca and alpaca/silk mixture I bought from Meadowsweet Alpacas. the yarn is lovely, soft and silky, about needle size 3,5 to 4. I wanted to make a dubbelmossa, a nordish hat that's very warm, for my DH. this is done by knitting a long "tube", which is later doubled up, i.e. one side is stuffed into the other; where the rim is folded over, there are really 4 layers of knitting. ideally suited to "cold heads"! I didn't have a proper pattern, but the basic instructions I found somewhere online were simple enough to translate into my own. so I knitted away until I came to the area of the upper layer, where I'd have to do the decreases - when I realised that the whole thing is probably too big, even when a second layer is put inside the first. I managed to come this far - but now I had to face it - frogging was imminent! I put the whole thing on long circulars and put it over my head (yep, I am a big-headed girl - not pig-headed though - well, most of the time at least:)) - far too large even for me and my Hagrid hair:( it nearly fell down over my head, so I can safely say that nothing else but taking it apart will help. the one good thing that came out of it: when looking at the photograph I realised that I didn't like the distribution of the three colours all that much! when doing it all over again, I'll use the colours differently - less dark brown in the upper part of the wide pattern, more below - and vice versa for the light colour! the lower border pattern can be quite wide as there are no decreases to work in this part. on the other hand it will be covered by the folded rim - so I might rethink the whole pattern after all..... who said knitting hats is easy and straight-forward?:)) well, it'll have to wait a little longer - I am still working on the other alpaca hat -black, grey and white and handspun. should be done today though - the scarf out of the same yarns will follow next.

2 comments:

Leigh said...

What a heartbreak! It does look lovely. Interesting that you are going to do the colors differently. Hopefully you'll be happier with it the 2nd time!

Helen said...

What a shame all that hard work. Pity there are no real hagrids around to put it on! The colours look lovely anyway quite yummy in fact. I wish I found it easy to knit hats sigh!:(