Thursday, February 05, 2009

Gnome Hat Project

My gnome hat partner is really, really into gnomes. She has a garden full. I wanted to make her a very special hat, but not too crazy. I found out she likes purple, and with that in mind I started to look for fiber.

At first I was going to wet-felt a hat, but my practice attempt proved I am not good enough at that yet. So I looked for spinning fiber, and found just the thing. The braid is from Traveling Rhinos. I pulled some dark purple from my stash.


The pattern is called "Gnomey Child's Hat" by Adrian Bizilia of Hello Yarn. I really liked the two-tone effect, so I decided to split the fiber up into a mostly purple and mostly green. That was a bit challenging and also caused me to have to do a lot of joins in my spinning. I only used about 1/8th of the purple fiber in the photo, just enough to ensure that the purple yarn really came across as purple. In ended up with these 2-ply skeins.


I got just the effect I wanted. To me the green is like moonlight reflecting, and the purple a midnight shadow. I can picture gnomes running around the garden in the moonlight. The yarn is really soft and there's just a bit of green in the purple and vice-versa. I altered the pattern by adding a bunch of stitches and rows. It is still pointy, but not outlandish.

1 comment:

Fluffy said...

I printed the pattern, but I like both of your hats better. I think I might have enough yarn left from the Bella Mittens to make one.