Think Ouside the Box

So using my handspun I shared in my last post I began knitting my darling husband another hat that is inspired by the simple ribbed watchman style cap Jacob wore in Twilight on the beach at La Push, and also because of the russett-y Jacob/Wolf color LoL!

Fiber was soft, yarn was soft, hat is itchy. Shoot! Very strange, some of the alpaca hairs have worked their way out of the twist of the yarn and out of the knit stitches so the hat has these little 2" long hairs all over it, LOL!!

I knitted my simple ribbed pattern forever and decreased down to 2 stiches, tried on the hat and I thought it was too short. Crap! Only had 5.5yds yarn left too.

What to do? What to do?
Do I frog the entire project? I talked it over with my friend Marion for a few minutes and settled on this little "fix up":.

I picked up stitches with size 4.0 needles along the inside of the cast on edge and knitted about 30 rows of stockinette stitch with black NaturallyCaron.Com’s “Country” yarn that I had leftover from another project. It’s merino/acrylic and machine washable. When that was about 3.5" long I bound it off and whip-stitched it up inside the hat all around as a lining so it won’t be itchy around his ears. Added bonus, it also makes the first half of the hat thicker and therefore, warmer. I used Jeremiah's head as a hatform because his big ol' head stretched the hat out nicely and made it so easy for me to sew the lining in. Shown here in the picture with the hat turned wrong side out so I could sewn it more easily.

Then I picked out down to the row before my original decreases, marked out 5 yards on the yarn with some waste yarn and began reknitting until I got to the waste yarn, then re-decreased and finished the hat. I ended up with about 2 feet of yarn leftover so I could have gone a little farther before my decreases but I didn’t want to cut it any closer.

He isn't home from work yet to try it on him or see if he likes it. If this doesn’t fit him, it can go in the Charity bin with this year’s homeless/hospital knits.

Sometimes projects don't go as planned. Sometimes the thing to do isn't always the most obvious (like my first idea to frog.) Think out side the box and be creative; creating is what you were doing to begin with anyway!