Finished Object Dance

Pi-eye-rit King. Or queen, for that matter. The Knit Like A Pirate Hat is done, for now. The part that fits on the head is a tad small in circumference, but I'm counting that wear will stretch that out. What's slightly more problematic is how high the brim is -- roughly 4 inches or so. But to back up a bit.

I used Cascade 220 Tweed in black (3 skeins, with a softball size left over of the third), with the trim in either Funny or Happy. If I were doing this again (probably not, but I've had the fun and excitement of trying it once) I wouldn't use the tweed for felting. The little color bits disappear, except for the white ones that now look like you've got dirty bits clinging to your hat. Eh.

Left is the hat when it was finished Saturday afternoon, with the 8 1/2 x 11 instructions for scale. Felting this took longer than I would have thought - about 2 1/2 hours in the dryer with several resoakings of both towels and hats.

Right is the blocking rig I came up with. The hat's crown is on a Corningware small casserole, held up over a 100 pack of CDs for circulation. The laundry supply containers are an attempt at shaping the sides into a triangle.

Left again is the hat midway through this evening. I knew I would have to do some fabric shaping with sewing to bring this large, relatively heavy and very floppity thing into a wearable shape. I started with taking little tucks in the first two corners to form the base of the triangle. I wasn't necessarily going for an equilateral triangle, but needed at least a balanced isosceles. What I also needed was a third hand to help get that last angle set right at the back. After that, I sewed the brim to the crown at three points - each midway along a side, to help form the triangle.

The crown felted small and tight for my head, but I'm thinking that wear will stretch that out. What I may do is resew the mid-side tacks to be closer to the trim on the vertical and therefore encourage the brim to not stand so high (currently about 4 inches). Currently the brim looks something like this, but standing out from the head, more.

Another hedgehog got finished the other night, and will await more fellows before it is felted. For scale, it is posed propped with a standard one-liter Nalgene bottle inside it. The blonde-ness is a cute effect. There will be more in the future.

The next experiment is an Elizabeth Zimmermann Dairy Queen Hat, but done in LPW on size 9s since I don't have any bulky weight handy. Worst case it may be small, but the mitten tree at Mind's Eye is coming up soon and it will fit a little 'un.

What I can't figure out is where my copy of Knitter's Almanac has gotten to..... Did I loan it to someone, or is it really, really buried?