Gayest Cap for a Windy Day
Finished
December 13, 2016
December 30, 2016

Gayest Cap for a Windy Day

Project info
Gayest Cap for a Windy Day by Woman's Weekly
Knitting
Neck / TorsoScarf
Helena
Needles & yarn
US 2½ - 3.0 mm
8 stitches and 12 rows = 1 inch
in Fancy rib
Blue 2
5 grams in stash
68 grams
Blue
Blue
Notes

30 Dec 2016: The instructions for the second row of the crochet edging tell you to work a treble into each d.c. for the row below, but say nothing about what to do over the chain loops between! You can’t really see from the picture, either… but I don’t think the intention is to work one treble into each chain to produce a solid border strip around the flowers, though this would be a possible interpretation. So I’ve worked seven chain between each treble, as for the d.c. in the first row, resulting in a basic ‘ladder’ of chain loops to frame the face.
I was tempted to look up various lace edgings and work one of those over the loops, but I didn’t. It might have been a bit stiff and heavy, anyhow.

Washed the scarf to match the hood, handling it extremely carefully this time, although it still lengthened a little -- no bad thing there. The wool definitely ‘blooms’ out into a fuzzier strand after washing, though it’s still rather harsh next to the skin.

After gathering and sewing the back of the hood into the scarf (using a basic overstitch through the edges which opens out to lie flat), I decided to catch the front corners down onto the scarf edge as well. This is definitely not as shown in the picture, but this hood is designed to sit over a mass of hair gathered at the forehead and at the nape of the neck, and in the absence of bouncy curls over the ears I feel that it might get a bit chilly if the wind gets in under the front!
With the thick crochet flower band secured over the ears the effect is actually surprisingly warm, despite the gaps between the flowers, and they’re standing out better in 3D than they were on the strip laid flat and looking more like the picture. I’m more pleased with this than I thought.

It’s tempting to pull the hood forward, but this makes a cold draught down the back of the neck where the narrowed garter strip rides up; it’s definitely intended to sit on the back of the head with the pinned hair peeping out at the front. :-)

29 Dec 2016: I tried washing the hood by hand in wool wash and rinsing it out in fabric softener. This did take off some of the harshness and mineral smell, but caused it to grow by an inch vertically and apparently shrink horizontally - hard to tell, because the ribbing also flattened. A pity it wasn’t the other way round!
Fortunately the crochet strip is more like 18” x 2” than the 16” required by the pattern. It’s very stiff and heavy compared to the hood, though.

I used the loose ends from the roses to sew them together, to save on sewing-in (it still took a couple of hours to assemble the strip). If I’d known I was going to do that I’d have left longer ends!

26 Dec 2016: 32 crochet roses of varying sizes in 16 colours completed. I knitted 160 rows of rib for the first 14-inch section of scarf, then 8 rows decrease + 36 rows plain garter + 8 rows increase for the centre section, as the original was 40 rows at 10 rows/inch: centre section now measures four inches. The decreases are very much less elegantly curved than in the pattern diagram!

17 Dec 2016: Finished the ribbing section - despite all the trouble I went to in order to get it to come out at 8” square as shown in the pattern diagram, it looks far too small to me! This hood is barely going to cover the ears, even with the scarf pulling the corners forward.

Started making the crochet roses, using a 3.0mm hook. 4-ply wool actually seems to produce terribly small roses compared to the ones visible in the pattern photo; I get better results with scraps of DK wool, really. Also, they have a tendency to come out with rather a large hole in the middle.

I might end up doing three rows rather than just two. And I might need more than 16 roses to a row, by the looks of it….

Modified the crochet pattern so that each rose only has one loose end instead of four; I work the dc stitches over the starting tail while working into the initial slip-stitch ring, and then use two or three slip-stitches to work back towards the centre and start the second row of petals with 3ch, instead of breaking off the wool and refastening it in the centre.

14 Dec 2016: Can’t get gauge with anything like the recommended needle size - using size 11 needles. I hope this wool will feel less harsh after washing; it reminds me strongly of the pure wool I used for the Art Deco jumper, not really anything you would want next to your face…

The pattern gives 80 rows for an 8-inch square, which I calculate at 10 rows/inch - I’m getting a pretty consistent 12 rows/inch. Knitted 78 rows to achieve the 6.5 inches specified for the first part of the pattern (64 rows). I calculate that I shall need to knit 18 rows for the remaining portion.

Fancy rib pattern has plain column, moss stitch, purl column, moss stitch, achieved very simply by knitting 2×2 rib across an odd number of stitches.

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Finished
December 13, 2016
December 30, 2016
 
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  • Project created: December 16, 2016
  • Updated: January 2, 2017
  • Progress updates: 4 updates