Thursday, August 30, 2007

I like hats!

I like hats. I think they are highly under rated these days. It used to be that hats were a necessary fashion accessory. Now, with the exception of the plethora of baseball caps out there, no one ever wears hats. I have my own nice collection of hats. Some are silly, some are fun, some are functional, and I wear them all!


(Note: closet shelf not usually this neat)

I wore the black bowler hat (which has a little shamrock pin on the side) through out college. It kind of became my trademark. When I'm feeling a little spunky, I wear it to work :-) I got the cowboy hat in Albuqurque, NM when I was going for a horseback ride along the Rio Grande and decided I needed something to really look the part. And with my love of Disney, I guess it's no surprise that I have several hats from Disney World. The Cheshire Cat hat brought lots of smiles when I wore it to work on Halloween. And of course, when you have the kind of blond, fair, freckled complexion that I do, it's necessary to have hats to keep the sun off my face...at least, that's how I justify it to Psycling when I go buy yet another hat.

So, with my love of hats, it is probably not surprising that I quickly learned to knit in the round so I could knit my own. I learned how to make hats by knitting with a group of women from church, as we knit hats for the homeless men that stay at the church night shelter. I knit and donated several hats to that program last year. Of course, this was before I started blogging and phtographing my FOs.



These are some of the hats that didn't quite get turned in on time for last years hat drive. They will still be donated to chartiy. I'll probably take them to be collected when I go see the Yarn Harlot in mid-September.

Of course, I had to knit a few hats for my own collection as well. I decided a while back that I needed to use up some of the yarn in my stash, and didn't buy any new yarn for a while. I had some great warm, soft, fuzzy black yarn just calling to be made into a hat. Well, turned out I had enough for two hats!

First, I introduce le Beret!


I'd give you the specs, but I'm afraid I don't remember what the yarn was, and the pattern was something I found online somewhere...but I really like it. It's warm, and I think it has some great personality to it. I'm looking forward to the couple of days we have down here in Hotlanta when it might actually be cool enough to wear it.

When I finished the Beret, and realized I still had quite a bit of yarn left, I cast on for my Wylie Hat.

I call it my Wylie cat because Wylie is the name of my black kitty, pictured here. Can't you tell how happy he was to be part of this photo shoot? Anyway, again, I don't remember the yarn, but the pattern is the Kittyville Hat from Stitch 'n Bitch by Debbie Stoller.

I already have a few new hat ideas rolling around in my head, but I might not be able to share them til after Christmas...I don't want to ruin anyone's surprise.