FO: Woolly Wormhead Mystery Hat KAL 2012

There are some SPOILER photos here; so don't continue if you want the hat to be a surprise. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've taken part in the Woolly Wormhead Mystery KAL 2012. This is the first time I've done this and I really enjoyed it. I normally steam through projects and I was kind of nice to be able to do a project in small portions; made me appreciate the experience more! Also, I'm not 100% sure I would have picked the hat had I seen it first. It's lovely but probably not something I would normally do. It's good to try different things.

It took an awful lot of effort to finally choose some yarn; I kept finding that everything I wanted to do would just go into a 2nd ball to fit the size I wanted. I finally found a yarn that would work with just 1 ball which is Louisa Harding, Amitola which is quite an unusual yarn. It's sold as a DK but it has 250m/50g which is an immense amount of yardage for a DK. It's a single ply yarn with long stripes.

My favourite part of the hat is the brim. I love a brim with a double thickness and it just fits great (well it did until I overblocked it!); I lost a bit of the negative ease with blocking but it still wears well.

Looking at the above photo, it looks like the brim is laying flat (which is what I thought when I sewed it down) but when I was picking up the stitches for the body of the hat, it started to twist. So I had to unpick the join and redo it.

I left the body of the hat a little shorter than recommended and waited to see what the final instalment would reveal. In the end I added an extra repeat (after a bit of frogging). I added some extra length in the crown too, as I had enough yarn left over.

So the finished hat, with my lovely stag button that I bought from Textile Garden and blogged about here.