Knits

I’ve had a fondness for eggplants (aubergines) for quite some time. I love their colour and their shape. I even named my pet iguana (r.i.p.) eggplant. So years ago when a girl I worked with came to work with a knitted hat that resembled an eggplant, I wanted one. Desperately.

However, it was only a few weeks ago that I got one. I re-learned to knit and had found that someone sells a pattern that makes various ‘fruit’ hats, but through serendipity I discovered a free pattern for a similar fruit hat. Hence, my hat I had been wanting for years was to be!

I had the yarn already and got knitting. I knit the hat on straight needles since I didn’t have the right size circular ones and the whole knitting on circular needles scared me (I’m past that now). I zoomed through the knitting of this hat only to find out that despite making something closer to the medium size and definitely larger than the small size, the hat didn’t fit. The pattern is for children, but it didn’t make mention of this. I guess I should’ve known because how many adults want to wear a hat that looks like a fruit?

I was very sad, but determined.

I bought a set of interchangeable circular needles and cast-on again. I guessed at the adjustments I needed to make and knitted and knitted and finally had to move to DPNs (double-pointed needles) which were definitely scary. I finished the hat and was very excited.

Yet again, I was met with minor disappointment mostly because I am a perfectionist. The knitting was nice and even except where I moved onto the DPNs. I was so worried about some awful gap between the needles that I changed my tension. It doesn’t really look like I did when you compare the green stitches to the purple stitches, but by the way that the leaves are a bit er puckered, you can tell I did. It’s made the rest of the hat look baggy. Also, since I had to change both the circumference and overall height, the proportions are out-of-whack (too much purple and not enough green) which I think adds to the baggy effect.

Ah well, I learned some lessons:

1. Knitting on circular needles is not scary at all
2. Knitting on DPNs is scary, but not as scary as I thought so next time relax a little!
3. Having the right length DPNs might’ve been easier - I only had massively long ones at hand

The details:

Yarn: Sirdar Aran in shades 0935 (green) and 0937 (purple)
Needles: Boye needlemaster US7 (5mm) 20″ circulars & US7 DPNs
Tension / gauge: 18 sts x 24 rows

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