Trying my hand at hats

I've never made many hats because I tend to look really stupid in hats.  But a friend of mine at work is going through chemo and I told her a couple of weeks ago that I'd make her a hat.  I know there are a gagillion cute hat patterns out there but the truth is, in case you didn't know it, I'm a bit lazy about looking for patterns.  The other reason I tend to not look at patterns too much is because I get overwhelmed by the choice and end up frustrated and unsatisfied.  But I did have to know how many stitches to cast on so I found one pattern for that purpose and started off.

Remember the carriage slippers?  I've been really interested in this honeycomb stitch which I've since found repeatedly in the vintage pattern books.  I thought that might make an interesting hat pattern so I went to Hobby Lobby and found a skein of naturallycaron.com's Spa yarn (an acrylic/bamboo mix) in the color she wanted and went to work.  Here what I came up with:

Cute, no?

In fact, it fit so well that I decided to make one for myself.  The Spa yarn was very soft but very, very splitty and I've got a whole roomful of handspun yarns now so I went shopping in the back room and came up with a skein of Merino/Yak that I spun early last year after I got my little Kromski wheel.  I estimated using about 200 yards of the Spa and a look at the tag on this skein showed I had 190 yards.  That's gotta be close enough.

Close only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades - and hats, apparently!

The true color is somewhere between these two photos.  It's incredibly luscious and covers my really uneven spinning wonderfully!

You probably can't tell in these pictures but I put a little tie on hers but not on mine.  Since she has to wear it all the time, I wanted her to be able to adjust it if she needs to.  Either way, I'm very pleased with it.

The pattern is available for free download from my website but I'll give you a bonus.  If you choose to work this in two colors (like the carriage slippers) you should work the first 4 rows of the pattern in one color and the second four in the other color.  Your main color will be pulled up through the contrasting color on the slipped stitches.  That should make sense when you've seen the pattern but there's nothing at all difficult about it.