Skeinspotting

An old classic updated

Some of you that know me will probably remember that last year during the winter, I handed out some of my clothes and some of my personal knits to the homeless people I met along the way to my knitting club. One of these people, I gave my very favourite plain ribbed hats in red and turqoise but knew that they were so quick to knit I would be able to do them again.

Well, here I am 18mths later only just getting round to re-knitting and improving this absoloute classic of a plain ribbed hat. I find in general that ribbed hats, although you would expect them to be easy and all the same, vary greatly in their shape and the poorer of these can have very clumsy decreases. So with this I have made sure that the purl areas decrease to nothing and the rib areas narrow to a point at the crown.

And the yarn? That is some yarn hand dyed by Woolly Wormhead. It is Wensleydale and is somewhere between a DK and a light worsted/Aran. I knitted it on 5mm needles to give it more of a lacy and holey look. Can you see as well the way the colours worked into a spiral on the crown? Am I clever? No, it is pure accident, so no emails asking me how to plan spirals like this in a hand dyed space yarn.

I also find that the Wensleydale wools and other British breeds other than merino are very thirsty fibres and suffering from dry skin myself, it can feel like two bits of sandpapers rubbing together despite the surfaces remaining shiny. I lovingly rubbed hair conditioner into this hat and left it in a warm soak. Then rinsed it in cold water, just like I would my own hair. You can see the fuzziness this has caused on one of the photos, that is not me with bad camera focus, it actually looks like that!