Making A Bunch of Pink Hats! + Tips for Working With Fleece

After the Women's March on Washington, my mama asked me to make her a pink hat, aka a pussyhat. * 

I'd already given away the extras I made before the march, so I needed to go buy some fleece. 

The waste I had left over the first time bothered me a bit. Each hat needs a strip that is 20 inches long and between 11 and 13 inches wide (I have a big noggin and I like to wear my hair in a bun, so, yes, my hat is 13 inches wide, when I cut it). 

If you take that out of 1 yard of fleece, you're left with weird scraps that are less than 16 inches long. Not good for a lot, although I may try piecing some scraps together into yardage.

So, I bought 1 and a quarter yards and cut it up like this: one strip that's 13 inches wide, 2 strips that are 12 inches wide and 2 strips that are 11 inches wide. Give or take. Fleece is bouncy, so cutting it is like corralling a wild animal that is made out of marshmallows. Checking the math: 13 + 24 + 22 is 59, so once you cut the selvedge off a piece of sold-as-60-inches fleece, you should have just enough. 

If the world were perfect, I would only need a piece of fabric 40 inches long to do this, but let's face it - I'm not perfect at cutting and neither are the ladies at the fabric store. So, that extra 5 inches is a little insurance for all of us, for shrinkage in the wash, and to give me something to test my machine with. 

So, I laid it all out, folded in half, and marked 6.5 inches in, 12 inches from that, and 11 inches from that, with chalk. 

This left me with 5 big strips that I then squared off and chopped into 20-inch-long pieces. I then folded them, right sides together, and stacked them to take upstairs and sew.



Folded in half. Ten pussyhats ready to sew!

Bonus Tips:

- When you're sewing a bunch of ears on hats, it can slow you down to mark where the ears should start and stop. Cut a post-it (or even just regular paper) into the size you want and use it as a template.

From the book, Wild and Wonderful Fleece Animals - "Fleece doesn’t ravel, so you don’t need any seam finishing. This fact alone makes fleece an easy and quick fabric to sew! Never press the seams with an iron, it could melt the fibers. Instead, finger-press the fabric to open the seams. You can also place a seam under a wooden block—or a heavy book, such as a dictionary—to smooth it and help it lie flat."

When you are finished, clean your machine, even if you don't usually clean up after every project. Fleece tends to shed a bit and it can gum up your machine worse than most other fabrics.

*She might not wear it now that she knows that, but I'm going to make her one, anyway.

My Spring Hat

The brim is flipped up, because I like to wear it that way.

Behold, my spring hat! I made it with my own handspun using the pattern I teach my beginning knitting students at community education. It's not too late to sign up!

If you're already familiar with casting on, knits, purls and decreases, but still want to come to class, I'll have a fingerless mitt pattern for you to try. Or, bring any project you want and I'll walk you through it!

Green Handspun Hat

I don't make resolutions (much), but I have decided that I really need to use my handspun! 

Clara Parke's class on stashbusting on Craftsy is a big help. She has a lesson on "letting go" of yarns, which I kind of needed. (Her organization lesson is important, too...)

So, I'm knitting up a spring hat. Easy, peasy. 

See? I Don't JUST Knit Socks

I forgot to take a good photo before I shipped it off, so please enjoy my (kind of bad) sketch!

I didn't have a chance to blog about it right away, but Juniper Moon Farm has just released a pattern from me: The Two-to-One Hat & Cowl. It's a very simple hat and cowl set that uses just a little bit of colorwork to jazz it up. The yarn is absolutely scrumptious! It really feels like butter on the needles.

I don't think I will ever get over how much fun it is to see something go from a sketch to a swatch to a finished thing that other people might knit.

Like it? You can buy it on Ravelry!

I Love Ravelry!

One of my favorite things about Ravelry is that it lets me see when someone knits one of my designs.

Sandra, who goes by Strempesan on Ravelry, in lovely Tétange, Luxembourg made an Almost Spring hat in a pretty cotton/wool blend for her mom. Isn't that cool? She's over 4,000 miles away and I can still see what she knit.

Design Inspiration: Almost Spring Hat

A friend of mine contacted me some time ago. She wanted a hat that would be easy to knit and look good on both adults and kids. I came up with the Almost Spring hat, complete with a "tendril growing up and looking for the sun."

I made mine in Encore Worsted, but I also love the version a test knitter made in Plymouth Yarn's Worsted Merino Superwash Kettle Dyed. I guess we both like Plymouth yarns!

What's In A Name?

Briefly, when I was a kid, I wrote poetry. I loved writing. I hated choosing titles for poems, though. When I became a photographer, I simply called everything by the numeric system I had developed for filing my negatives.

I worry about naming things. A lot. I know names matter, so I worry about picking a good one.

Fortunately, I have clever friends. I described the above hat, which is made in 12 sets of 12 rows, to one and she said, "Well, that's a gross."

There you have it.

The So Easy It's Gross Hat.

No one else has used it on Ravelry, either.

(Yes, I always check.)

Peace Fleece is Awesome

Hat knit in Peace Fleece, lined with another hat knit from random thrift-store boucle. Keeping me ridiculously warm and happy since the year 2000. Shown here repelling water (snow) through the power of 25% mohair.