A Hat & A Bag to Boot
more summertime knitting
By now, having knitted over 20 items, I had a slight problem. I have accumulated an Everest-sized stash of yarn. Inevitably, when I want to knit something, especially for myself, I am loathe to reuse yarn, not because ‘ew leftovers’ but because I usually want to make something completely different and while my stash is large, it is not terribly diverse. All of my Christmas knitting last year was done with acrylic; I have leftover wool yarn from several projects but I can’t really wear wool like that; and it turns out 100% cotton yarn is really only good for washcloths. So what to do with a shit ton of yarn I’m not super excited about?
Well, if I smash some of this left over yarn together, maybe I’ll like it more. The biggest problem was dealing with the massive amount of cotton yarn left over from my colorwork hat. It needed to be used in something that had structure. A tote bag? A bucket hat? Why not both?
Project Info: Hat
Pattern: A Summer Hat by Tracy Purtscher
Yarn 1: Classic Cotton Yarn by Loops and Threads, seafoam colorway, 100% cotton, medium weight
Yarn 2: Impressions Yarn by Loops and Threads, basil colorway, 100% acrylic, bulky weight
Needles: US 9 circular (used US 8 DPNs for finishing)
Misc: thrifty
I searched far and wide for this hat pattern. I wanted something a bit cuter than a baseball hat to wear during the summer and thought a wide-brimmed kind of bucket hat would be cool. But turns out most bucket hat patterns are for crocheting? Something about the structure crocheting provides… When I dug this pattern up, I knew I could work with it - I didn’t care if the brim was super stiff/held it’s shape and I didn’t care about the edging details, so I massively simplified the pattern by doing a single layered brim. I also elected to pick up the stitches inside-out to start the crown portion of the hat with a border to better differentiate it from the brim.
I should point out that the person who made this pattern must’ve been British, because it calls for #5 needles - I knew it couldn’t possibly be telling me to knit bulky and worsted weight yarns held together with such a tiny needle. I then discovered that UK needle sizes are labeled backwards relative to US sizes. So their #5 is our 9 needle.
The hat is worked brim first and would in principle be knitting from inside –> outside –> inside to create a thicker, layered brim. But I thought that might be too heavy for my taste. Once I finished the brim I went back to the cast on edge and picked up stitches to work on the side of the hat. Then create a virtually flat top/crown by decreasing 8 stitches each row. It was incredibly easy! I ended up knitting the hat over 3 days while visiting home. I’ve worn it so much since and even gave it a wash in the washing machine.
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Quick summer hat. First checking brim fit and then finished in the car ride home.
The brim ended up uncurling at the brim edge after blocking. It’s not stiff or flat like the pattern example but I don’t mind a little warping, it feels more beachy or something.
Project Info: Bag
Pattern: Seamless Tote Bag by Suzanne Smart
Yarn 1: Classic Cotton Yarn by Loops and Threads, seafoam colorway, 100% cotton, medium weight
Yarn 2: Classic Cotton Yarn by Loops and Threads, peacock colorway, 100% cotton, medium weight
Yarn 3: ??? yarn I recycled from this old hat
Yarn 4: Line by Sandnes Garn, almond colorway, linen and cotton blend, worsted weight
Needles: US 8 circular and DPNs
Misc: yarn-eater
I think I set a record with this bag. Knitted in around 12 hours, it was a get-rid-of-old-yarn-and-I-need-a-bag-to-take-to-the-beach double whammy. Like with the hat, most tote/market bag patterns I saw were for crocheting, I think because it’s easier to make rectangular/very oval shapes with crocheting but this bag was special because it was all one piece! No stitching the bottom to the rest of the bag.
But that isn’t to say it was as easy as the hat. The bottom of the bag was a bit of a challenge: a 20x60-ish stitch rectangle knitted in the round, which meant the circular needles had to conform to that funky rectangle shape until there was enough slack for the stitches to relax into a round shape. Thankfully the body of the bag was a super simple but interesting pattern: 5, 10, or 15 rows knitted, 2 rows of purling, 1 row YOs, 2 more rows purling, which made this cool cutout effect. But the best thing about this bag is how well it fulfilled its duty of using up yarn. Both skeins of the blue cotton yarn (with help from the hat) are gone as well as the linen yarn from the summertime vest. I was actually worried I had too little yarn to finish, as the strap was a bit shorter than anticipated by the time the yarn was gone. But after a wash and lots of use, it has stretched out to basically just the right length for a tote bag. It holds a surprising amount too!
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En route to the beach & down by the river.