Another project that I finished but haven’t blogged was the Urban Necessity Tam/Beret from MagKnits.
Here is a shot from the top, so you can see the snowflake pattern.
And here’s what it looks like on me. The hubby took this photo in front of a mirror — a trick to show how it looks like from both front and side at the same time. So it might look as if I have a twin, even though I don’t!
Pattern: Urban Necessity Tam, from MagKnits September edition.
Yarn: About 1.5 balls of Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran Tweed (10 ply) in Dove.
Needles: 4mm circulars and dpns.
I knitted this hat almost twice. The first time around, I used 5mm/US 8 needles. My swatch with the 5mm needles showed that my gauge was 19 sts to 10cm/4in. But how do you know what size to knit when knitting a hat? I measured my head, and got 54cm. But then again this is a tam/beret, which means it should be a slightly loose fit except for the band. Anyway, still unsure of which size to knit, I picked the medium size. Well, what do you know, I got to halfway through the snowflake pattern, which is only about 15 more rows to the end, and then I found out that it’s just too big. The diameter was 90 cm! Turned out my gauge when knitting in the round was different from when knitting flat, which I did when I was swatching. Sigh. So, unless I wanted to turn the thing into some sort of oddly shaped jumper, it just wouldn’t do. Into the frog pond it went.
The lesson to be learnt here is probably that, when swatching for something that is to be knitted in the round, swatch in the round too.
The second time, I used 4mm needles, and using the smallest size in the pattern. When I got to the halfway point, where the diameter is the largest, I thought it still looked rather big. But I really didn’t want to knit it a third time. I thought, what the heck, if it still doesn’t work I might as well jump in to a frog pond myself make some i-cord, attach it to the thing and call it a bag. But fortunately it didn’t come to that. The finished hat turns out to fit perfectly, even when I have my hair up in a bun.
Pattern changes: The snowflake pattern repeat, on the decrease rows, it begins with a k2tog on the right and ends with a ssk on the left, so when put together, the ssk and k2tog are next to each other. I found that (probably just with my tension), it produced an unsightly gap or laddering effect between the pattern repeats. So I added a knit stitch between the k2tog and ssk. And I think it made the pattern looked better. And to compensate for the extra stitches, at the top of the hat where it says k2tog across row, I did sl1, k2tog, psso across row.
