Experimental Charity Hats

Well my annual Mitten Tree gig is just around the corner, and I hardly knit anything for this worthwhile charity project, so I got busy this week and knit a few hats and mittens. Here are the hats. Always easily bored, I decided to experiment with something new. I grabbed some Noro Silk Garden that I had in my stash and created this hat using an Estonian spiral ribbing. This first hat came out smaller than I thought it would, but it is for charity and it will fit someone, probably a 2 or 3 year old, I would guess. I tried to maintain the spiral pattern up to the top, but had difficulty seeing it in the lumpy Noro yarn, although I liked the color changes combined with the spiral pattern. I decided I needed to try this pattern with a less lumpy, long colorway yarn.

Now, like any good knitter I have lots of stash. I have dozens and dozens of skeins of lovely wool, much of it handpainted and beautiful, but other than the Silk Garden, how much of it do you suppose I had on hand in a long colorway? You guessed it, zero, zip, nada. So of course,like any good knitter, I had to run to my LYS to purchase new yarn rather than use up any more of the dozens and dozens of skeins in my stash. (Did I mention this is for a charity project?) I bought one skein of Universal Yarns' Shades and one skein of Wisdom Yarns' Poems to continue my experiments in hats with Estonian ribbing.

Here is my second hat, sized for an elementary school age child, it used approximately 1/2 of the Shades skein. As you can see, I decided to add corkscrew tassles. I love it! The pattern is so ridiculously easy that I'm thinking of offering it as a free pattern on Ravelry. It will be interesting to see how many people will want to knit it up.

For my third and final experiment, I decided to try combining the Estonian ribbing with a patchwork top to create a flat top tocque. I used the Poems yarn in a rainbow mix, and this is pretty darn cute as well, although my picture doesn't do it justice because you can't see the tocque shape when it is not on someone's head. The hat is just a bit small for me because I made it child sized for the charity project, so that's why you don't see me modeling it. I tried it on the cat, but she isn't a very good model either. While I like this hat, I prefer the corkscrew topped experiment number 2. Also, I had to use every bit of the yarn to make the child sized version 3 tocque, while the Shades yarn used in version 2 has enough yardage to make 2 child size hats or an adult hat with a good amount of leftovers. I can't wait to post experimental hat #2 on Ravelry. I'd love to see how many fans it gets! My only dilemna--what to call it?? Corkscrew Cap seems appropriate, but I try to name my knitting patterns with travel related names (All American Baby Hat, Eiffel Tower Gloves, etc.) to promote the Knitter's Journey theme. Perhaps I should call it Estonian Rib hat, but that sounds blah. Any suggestions out there?