FO: Aghast Hat

It’s done! It’s done!

Project: Aghast
Pattern: none (I made it up!)

For Christmas / our anniversary (I know, the timing is … interesting?) I wanted to knit a Gengar-themed hat for my boyfriend. So I opened up Google Sheets and spent some time coloring in cells on the pattern. Ideally I would have been doing this by hand. I much prefer sketching ideas out with pen and paper, but I didn’t have any properly-sized graph paper (stockinette is, it turns out, not comprised of squares, but rather rectangular-ish “pixels”). Maybe I’ll have to get my hands on some for next time.

This was my second-ever attempt at colorwork. Last time I tried to knit a colorwork hat, I thought it was tremendous fun, but also very slow.

I learned a lot during this project:

• how to trap long floats (still need to work on this)
• what is color dominance
• how to knit two-handed when working stranded colorwork patterns
• never ever ever to do 3+ colors per row 🙃
• it still takes ~3 days for wet-blocked items to dry in my apartment. Why do I always forget this?
• …you should really swatch and test for color-fastness before knitting an entire stranded colorwork project. I don’t know why I didn’t do this. (Oh right, I’m foolish.) The resulting color bleed wasn’t terrible but I should have made sure to have some vinegar on hand. This is my second time running into this with Cascade 220, too…

I spent a good amount of time perusing Mary Jane Mucklestone’s 150 Scandinavian Motifs, which was really helpful. Not only are there plenty of example motifs to work with (which, mostly, were not relevant to this project), but the first section of the book is densely packed with so-called “essential skills” for working with stranded knitting patterns.

Anyway. It’s done! Er…almost. I still have to weave in the ends…!