Adventures In Hat Surgery
I posted an article a few weeks ago about a hat I’d made from a pattern of my own design. In the course of that post, I referenced head measurements. Specifically, my own head measurements. And the hat was gorgeous and fit me beautifully. However. I have many (MANY) knit hats already and I honestly didn’t need another. So I thought it would make a nice Christmas gift for a friend of mine. I left it in her cubby at work and didn’t think anything more about it until I finally got around to asking her a couple weeks later if the hat fit her. No. It didn’t fit her. Because her head is smaller than mine.
The idiocy of custom-knitting a perfectly-fitted hat for one person and then giving it to another (whose head you have not measured) does not escape me. And there were a few palm-slapping-the-forehead moments. But irritation and self-flagellation don’t fix the problem. So I took the hat back and decided to do surgery to make it fit.
I started just above the double-thickness brim, as close to the beginning of round as I could manage (normally, it’s not that hard to find the jog in the stitches that tells you where one round ends and the next begins, but these stitches are small!), and snipped one leg of a stitch, then carefully worked the brim free from the body of the hat.
Next, I pulled out all the stitches in the detached brim, and wound the yarn into a ball. I’d reuse it to knit the new brim. Now, since the pulled-out yarn was all kinked up, I probably should have either washed/blocked the yarn to straighten it out or—and this would have been a much better choice, had I only thought of it—found the yarn left over from the first time I knit the hat, and used that (smooth) yarn. I didn’t do either of those things. I just decided to knit my brim with the kinked up yarn and hope it would all come right when I washed and blocked it again.
Next step was to carefully insert my needles stitch by stitch into the “live” stitches I’d just exposed on the body of the hat. Since I would be working into the bottom of the stitches, they were less likely to ravel but still, the stitches were very small and there were a lot of them. 162 stitches, in fact, so it was not a speedy process. Once I’d gotten my new needle into all the stitches, I started working 2x2 ribbing. Since 162 isn’t divisible by 4 (but 160 is) I decreased two stitches on the first round.
My attempt to make the brim smaller here was two-fold. 1) Ribbing, especially the very elastic 2x2 ribbing, draws the fabric in, making it smaller but stretchy. And 2) I was using smaller needles. The hat was originally knit with 2.5mm needles, but I decided to knit the brim with 2.25mm needles. I’d initially planned 3 inches of brim (that is sooooo much 2x2 ribbing…aggghhhhh) but when I got to about 2.5 inches, the brim looked very generous, so I stopped there and cast off with the ever-useful Jenny’s Surprisingly Stretchy Bindoff.
As you can see in the pictures below, the ribbing looks very rough, even more than it usually does pre-blocking, because I was knitting with kinked yarn. And as you can also see, the ribbing draws in the hat a bit, which is what I wanted. But that genius bindoff is so stretchy that I can stretch the bound-off edge as wide as the stitches themselves will go. Amazing.
Finally, the blocking, to see if it all worked out. After a nice soak in room-temperature water with a little wool wash, I like to block hats using my 7” styrofoam ball (if you leave the plastic wrap on it, it plays more nicely with the wool) perched on a small bowl so that it doesn’t roll away. And if the hat hangs long enough that it’s brushing your tabletop, you can elevate the bowl by placing it on an inverted bowl. Then just let it sit until it dries.
And as usual, the blocking worked miracles. All that raggedy-looking ribbing smoothed right out and looked lovely. And best of all, when I gave it back to my coworker, it fit her perfectly. Surgery was a success! Huzzah!
