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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Lotus

I have recently been expanding my hat wardrobe. I have decided that hats go with most of my casual day to day wear and are a great way to 1) stay warm and 2) cover up a bad hair day. My newest addition to my hat wardrobe is this.

Lotus Hat



It's the Lotus Hat by UptownPurl and it can be found free on her blog. It's a very simple 8 row zig-zag lace repeat that makes beautiful vine-like motifs running up the hat.

I made a few changes to the pattern as written but they were so minor and mostly based on other ravelers' suggestions. I did the 1x1 ribbing as twisted rib instead of normal. I did the ribbing for 10 rows instead of 6. I knit 4 repeats of the pattern before decreasing instead of 3 to make it come down over my ears. That's all. Not minor changes, but worth mentioning if you want your hat to look "just" like this one.

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This is the hat blocking over a balloon... my new favorite way to block hats. A bag of balloons was less that $2 at Target (in the area with the birthday wrapping paper) and it's so much faster than blocking by laying flat. I just blew up a balloon to 21" circumference and put the hat on it. No having to constantly flip the hat to make sure both sides are drying, no having to rotate how the hat is laying so that it doesn't dry with a crease, AND it drys 3x as fast because the wet layers aren't sitting on top of each other keeping the moisture in.

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The best part of the hat is the crown where the decreases make the vines spiral together beautifully.

I used Malabrigo Merino Worsted in colorway Black Forest. According to my yarn scale, this took 50.5 g of yarn, so just a bit over half a skein. This was leftover from my earlier Botanic hat, where I used it as the secondary color, and even after both hats I still have 33 g left. I'm thinking I will just be able to squeeze a short pair of fingerless mitts out of it.

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Action shot! Also, a picture of my fuzzy mitts from last post where they can be seen in actual use... and in sunlight no less. Much thanks to the Portland weather gods for sending a bit of sunshine our way.

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