Scrappy Hats

You know how, when you knit, there's always yarn left over? Always? And how you just can't help yourself but you must keep it? 

There are drawers full of yarn at my mother's house. Oh, there are whole skeins with their tags still on, and a bag of baby weight mustard yellow cashmere tidily unraveled from a failed sweater, but mostly there are scraps. A yard here, a ball there, pretty soon you're talking YARN. 

I'm a terrible knitter, but I kind of like the idea of it, and it's something portable to do on the train when I'd rather listen to music than read. I keep thinking I'm going to make a sweater one day, but instead, I make baby hats. Sometimes I make them with a specific baby in mind, and sometimes I mail them off to the local hospital's NICU. 

So what I've been doing is working my way through the scrap yarn in the big workroom at my mother's. I gather up enough bits in complementary colors, cast on 60 stitches, and just start mindlessly knitting. When it looks right, I start decreasing. Bang zoom, a little roll brim hat.  I change color with abandon, I usually tie the ends together (the horror!), and I sometimes mix wool and acrylic and cotton. Often, I'll use a bit or a lot of something whose provenance I know - like the pictured hat: the pale blue cotton was leftover yarn from a hat that I made for my mother. 

There's something completely satisfying about a little hat made from nothing. 

Posted by Magpie

Photo by Niobe

Comments

[liz]

I love this idea. You are officially an inspiration.

[Tara]

I love this blog but Google Reader can't find a feed and that's how I read blogs. Is there a glitch?