Fedorable

Yet another knitting project where I could not force myself to get away from plain stockinette stitch... but I'm not even sure this registers as knitting on most people's radars. The bulk of its creation was all things I'd never done before. Millinery is a whole other animal.

I used this pattern as a base, knitting with just under 2 skeins of Cascade 220 in the Japanese Maple colorway on US size 11's. I knitted about two extra inches on the brim (total 7") to ensure an extra wide brim. Post-felting it's about 4.5 inches. I chose to hand-felt to better control shrinkage.

The shape comes from an existing straw hat that I stuffed tinfoil in to make a cheap but effective hat block. The crown is stiffened with an old hatmaking method of paste made from gelatin and cornstarch, then set with a steamer (in my case, a steam humidifier because my iron done gone and broke on me). And it is very stiff, almost like there could be cardboard inside. I didn't think such an "organic" method would properly do the job, and yet!

Original hat and its tinfoil block baby.

Drying/blocking. I used my dice and dice bag to help weigh the crown down to the mold, kind of like using pie weights when you blind bake your crust.

Other construction notes include: sewing millinery wire to the brim to eliminate floppiness and sewing grosgrain ribbon to the inside of the crown to fit it snugly on my head.

I don't normally post my WIP pics. I think I should start, so that I may better demonstrate my process.

While I'm overall very happy with my hat, I'm a little bummed that it doesn't fit that well. The crown is too shallow for my head because I didn't knit it to a suitable length or, more likely, my hat mold was too short and therefore I blocked it too short. It has trouble staying on my head. Darn.

I might sew some leftover ribbon into a chin strap if I have to. I think the kind I'm envisioning makes hats look dated but a sad old hat is better than one that flies away with the wind or falls off when you nod your head too exuberantly.

And now, because I don't know where else to put the photos in the post, me modeling m'hat: