This is a very nice easy to follow pattern and just great for what I have in mind.

I’m going to knit and felt the hat, and I’ve bought a red pheasant’s feather, some beautiful ribbon, and a bronze lion-head brooch for the decoration.

I’m knitting the adult non-slouchy one, though I’m actually going to do a little slouch in the style of Gandalf’s wizard hat, though my brim will be nice and high and one edge may even be slightly turned up. (^_^)

So far I’m somewhere between row 21 to 30 and it’s going well. The yarn is not dyefast which is gross and there is a disappointing amount of vegetable matter in it. This is the worst Lincraft Cosy yarn I have bought, which is sad, especially given they’ve raised the price to $6.99 per skein!

18th January, 2013 - I

Fucking

Won.

(^_^)

Okay this may not seem like a big deal to most, but here’s my victory for the day. So I’ve been working on this Gryffindor Witch hat. This is the hat where the dye in the yarn wasn’t fast, so I had to wear rubber gloves whilst knitting so I didn’t poison myself. This is the the hat where the yarn shed like crazy and had heaps and heaps of vegetable matter. I persevered. I kept knitting. I don’t often knit big things, I’m a slow knitter and it aggravates me to have to wait so long, but I kept going with this.

Tonight, I finished knitting and into the washer it went to felt. It’s a front-loader, so it’s a bit iffy about felting. It felts well. Sometimes too well. I had to pause the washer for a little bit, and when I re-started it it went to restart the entire wash. A 90 minute super hot anti-bacterial wash… So I paused it and flipped the dial round the just spin. It spun. And spun some more, and a bit more after that. When it finally finished spinning, it stopped. It took AGES for it to decide to unlock itself, but then it was out!

Annnnd it was bell shaped. WTF!? I’m trying to pull the brim out and it’s just doing a Gandalf style on me, not a tight flat witch brim.

I had found the exact right size piece of wire for the brim. 52 or 53 inches around. It was the outer edge of the cage of my last stand fan. Using my jewellery wire cutters, I cut allllll the little spokes off and had just the nice flat edge, though it was a bit sharp where all the spokes had been cut off.

The brim was SO. MUCH. FUCKING. SMALLER. than this bit of wire. So I put one edge of the brim over the wire, and my foot on those, and stretched and stretched whilst Ro was a darling and used a spay bottle with water to keep the hat damp and to keep me from expiring given it was around 27 fucking degrees Celsius at 1:00AM. (@_@)

In trying to get the brim of the hat over the edge of the wire, I scrape those little sharp bits I mentioned over my hand, which is now bleeding from one spot and showing red from two other scratches. Okay, I can deal with that, after I’ve got the brim.

The words ‘I will win, motherfucker’ were said more than once. So was ‘come on you asshole, don’t be an asshole’. (^_^)

Finally, I could see the end was near. I was getting it, the edge of the brim were slowly getting over the entire ring of wire! I DID IT! I WON! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

It’s blocking now. I have no intention of touching it until Sunday as I’m supposed to be resting as we suspect I’ve pulled a lower stomach muscle. Ahhhhhh, so good. (^_^)

I’m excited to put it all together, with the band, feather, and brooch. Given the difficulty with the brim, I’m not sure if I’m going to try to bend it or not…

It’s not as laid back as I wanted, but there’s still a bit of sqidge to the shape of the hat.

I knit the adult not slouchy size, but added an extra st stitch round per decrease because I had to do A LOT of extra knitting to get the brim to be as wide as it should be! That’s probably why I had so much trouble with blocking the brim. Anyway, photos after it’s all done!