Tag Archives: Susan Villas Lewis

Think fall…and hats

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For those who follow my blog you are forgiven for thinking, “Yawn. That knitter is knitting the Thinker hat again.” I am. I definitely am. This hat is wonderful one. It fits well. It’s fun to knit. It’s a quick knit. The Thinker is a fits-all-head-sizes great hat! Check out The Thinker by Susan Villas Lewis. For $6 US you’ll have a hat pattern that works from newborn to extra large adult.

This is the (ahem) 12th time I’ve knit The Thinker. And I’m thinking about knitting it again soon!

This time I used a wonderful but sadly discontinued yarn by Sugar Bush Yarns: Bold. It was an excellent superwash merino worsted and I was disappointed to see it bite the dust. That’s true even though I managed to snag a boatload of skeins at a great price at WEBS a good while back.

I make a few modifications in the pattern to make it even more perfect (to my way of thinking). I knit the ribbing on US 5’s and the body on 7’s instead of knitting the entire hat in the same needle size. And after the ribbing I knit one round plain before starting the body of the hat. I also knit one round before starting the second section of ribbing, after the main body of the hat. Those extra rounds create an attractive transitional “furrow” that I like. Totally knitter’s choice on that. The largest size ends after half a section of the garter stitch, after what amounts to a round 9. I knit a round 10 before transitioning into the ribbing.

Even a super organized crown decrease!

Next up is Christine Kelly’s Mutze, actually it’s Mutze with an umlaut above the “u.” But this keyboard dummy can’t figure out how to type an umlaut so umlautless Mutze will have to do. I knit my Mutze in Berroco Lanas, a wool worsted.

My only modification was to work the crown decreases only until I got the stitch count down to 12. I feared that following the pattern exactly with a final set of decreases would result in the dreaded pointy-hat-syndrome. ‘Tis a condition to be avoided at all costs in my knitting world. Heads don’t come to a point and hats shouldn’t either, in my view. Well, except baby hats. We can put babies’ heads in any kind of silly hat we want to. They do not care.

Mutze is a good no-nonsense hat, akin to a number of hats with this same basic construction: alternating reverse stockinette ridges with ribbing of some sort. It’s an excellent addition to the catalog.

PentaCap is next: a freebie by the very talented hat designer, Wooly Wormhead. OK. Probably her mom didn’t name her Wooly and her birth certificate doesn’t say her surname is Wormhead. But she goes to great lengths to keep her “real” name to herself. She goes by Wooly. And she also says that she just made up the name “Ruth Patterson” when the NY Times interviewed her on businesses like hers reacting to Brexit by shifting their companies to Estonia, though apparently just in the digital world.

I’m digressing. Nothing new in that. PentaCap is a typical Wormhead creation. Strong structural elements. Lots of great techniques to learn. I knit mine in Plymouth Yarn Worsted Merino Superwash Solid. It’s a tad pricey. But there’s a lot of bang for the buck. And when someone throws the hat in the washer and then in the dryer all will be well.

I used the suggested crochet cast-on. You work it just like a provisional crochet cast-on except that instead of working with a contrasting yarn, you work with the main color. And you don’t unravel it to work in the “other” direction. You simply enjoy the stretchiness and how nicely it frames the hat.

At the end of the garter stitch section comes a “bind off braid.” That’s what creates the interesting raised ridge before the stockinette section begins. For me it’s a new tool for the toolbox. Here’s the link to the designer’s tutorial on how to work a “bind-off braid.”

And PentaCap has a nice swirly, well-behaved crown.

It’s warm here in Michigan. Not Phoenix or Miami warm. Breathing in deeply doesn’t sear your lungs. And if you stumble to the sidewalk you won’t end up in the burn unit. (That weather is nothing to joke about and I won’t.)

But, anyway, it’s warm for here. These are the dog days of summer, after all: 20 days before and 20 days after the dog star Sirius rises and falls in conjunction with the sun. In case you don’t have your star charts handy, that’s from about July 3rd to about August 11th. I always enjoy knitting hats during the dog days. Hats are small projects. They don’t create a lot of heat in your lap. So consider knitting a hat! Pretty soon heads in your neck of the woods will be needing them.

Doubled

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I think these are super cute and so do hundreds of others who’ve knitted Jelka since Isabell Kraemer released the pattern as a freebie in December of 2021. Jelka is a very easy slip stitch pattern, with a doubled brim that will keep ears warm and dry.

It starts with a provisional cast-on. Here’s my favorite crochet provisional cast-on, demonstrated by Lucy Neatby. Don’t groan. This one is easily worked. And it pulls out beautifully when you need it to, no unraveling or tangling. Just be sure that your first row after the cast-on is all knits or (I think) all purls. Jelka’s first round after the cast-on is all knit. Such an alert call by Kraemer. Other than working the provisional cast-on properly, another hint for the joining round is to pick up the cast-on stitches onto a needle 1 or 2 sizes smaller than your working needle.

Of course the pompom is optional. I think they usually look ratty after the hat is washed, so I often steer clear of pompoms. But this hat just seemed to want one. So I obliged.

I knit my first Jelka in Malabrigo Rios. The main color is Sunset and the contrast color is Teal Feather.

The hat benefited by a steam blocking to encourage the slipped stitches to relax into the fabric.

Why would anyone want to knit something more than once? I know that there are many knitters who ask that question out of sincere puzzlement. They want each knitting adventure to be, well, an adventure. Take it from someone who’s knit 50 Acorn Hill Ponies, 26 Calorimetry earwarmers, 16 Sunrise Side Bears, 15 Windschief hats, 13 Noro Striped Scarves, 11 Fetching fingerless mitts, 11 The Thinker hats, 11 Rambling Rows blankets, 10 Better Dorm Boots, and 9 Rib Sampler Scarves, that some knitters take solace in the familiar. Sometimes knitting adventures aren’t what I crave.

As soon as I knit my first Jelka, I wanted to knit another. I don’t think there’s a much higher compliment to a designer than to feel that way.

My second Jelka is knit in Plymouth Yarns Select Merino superwash.

I was curious how a much more tame color combination would work out. My sense is that it worked out quite nicely.

I even decided to add a two-color pompom.

I’ve already mentioned that I’ve knit The Thinker hat 11 times. Recently I realized it had been nearly 2 years since I’d returned to Susan Villas Lewis’ excellent pattern. Thinkers look especially nice in solid colors that show off the stitches. And I had recently purchased some solid skeins of Sugar Bush Bold worsted. First came one.

And immediately came another. The second is worked in a nice bright shade of Bold tailor-made for walks during hunting season.

The Thinker has an excellent pinwheel crown decrease. It looks a little odd laying flat. But just tell your recipients to stop laughing and put it on their heads because what first looks pointy behaves absolutely non-pointy.

One of my best knitting buddies, Dot, has knit multiples of this next hat. I figured that must mean it’s an excellent knit. Jesie Ostermiller’s Portsmouth Beanie did not disappoint. I knit my first one in Cascade Yarn’s Elysian. It’s a new yarn to me. It’s an easy-care worsted in 60% merino, 40% acrylic. I liked the yarn. I really like this unisex pattern.

The pattern also eats yarn very daintily. I knit the largest size and only used 127 yards.

I knit a second Portsmouth Beanie in Sugar Bush Bold. I apologize for that funny little purl hiccup in the middle of my ribbed brim. If I’d have seen it before the photograph, I’d have fixed it. But it’s still a very serviceable and attractive hat.

And the no-nonsense crown decreases work well.

I see no shame in knitting doubles. Maybe there’s a little bit of shame in knitting 50 of the same ponies or 11 of the same blankets. I’ve already confessed my guilt on that score. At a minimum it shows my knitting imagination is easily satisfied. I genuinely enjoy seeing the same pattern knit in different yarns. But likely the major motivation is that such knitting feels comfortable and familiar. Sort of chicken soup for my hands.

Yep…more hats

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I do like knitting hats. A bit too much, some might say.

This is Scrappy Ski Cap by Justyna Lorkowska, a freebie on Ravelry. Instead of making it out of assorted oddments as Lorkowska suggests, I used leftovers from two colorways of Plymouth Yarn’s Worsted Merino Superwash. So, mine is a somewhat more organized looking scrappy hat.

I’m very pleased with how it worked out. The last few years have been the years of the pompom, pom pom, pom-pom…however you want to spell it. Possibly that’s the star of this hat.

Everyone who looks at my Scrappy Ski Cap chortles on about liking the two-color pompom. There’s no trick to that, of course. I just wound a second color onto one section of my trusty Clover pompom maker. It comes in three sizes. I have them all. For this one I used the largest size. And, in case you’re wondering, Clover thinks pompom is spelled “pom pom.”

Also, in case you’re wondering, Webster’s apparently favors the hyphen and says that “Pom-pom is derived from the French word pompon, which refers to a small decorative ball made of fabric or feathers. It also means an ‘ornamental round tuft’ and originally refers to its use on a hat, or an ‘ornamental tuft; tuft-like flower head.'”  OK. I did not know that.

“And now for something completely different.”  A beret. Lordy. She’s knit a beret. She’s knit Natalie Larsen’s Star-Crossed Slouchy Beret. I used the Aran-weight Berroco Peruvia rather than the suggested Malabrigo worsted. It’s a different look.

Here’s Glasshead wearing it like a beanie because she doesn’t much like berets either. Why did I knit this beret? Mostly because I’m knitting hats for others and Ravelers have knit and posted projects on this hat 14,754 times (as of today) and the pattern is in 13,916 Ravelers queues of patterns they hope to knit. So, apparently, some people do like berets. And a lot of people definitely like this particular beret.

After knitting my beret, I steamed it gently, placing the round of increases on the edge of an appropriately sized bowl. Speaking of the increases, at least in this yarn and knit at this gauge, they show up in a rather unpleasant ring as the hat broadens out to a beret. Knit 2, make one (along the whole round) by doing a backwood loop on the left hand needle and knitting into the back of the stitch seems a bit too prominent an increase for me. And I think that would be true whatever the yarn. So, if I knit this again, I’ld probably try a different increase. It is a pretty head-thing, though–as berets go.

This next hat I’ve knit twice before. It’s Breck, by Susan Vilas Lewis. It’s a great sport-weight slouchy. I knit the body of the hat in Mrs. Crosby Hat Box. Hat Box is an unusual (but wonderful) merino (55%), cashmere (12%), acrylic (33%) mix. I used Debbie Bliss Cashmerino for the red of the mosaic work. Hat Box’s heathered quality, which I normally think is a plus, caused the mosaic work to be a bit subdued. But I still really like this hat.

Here’s the mosaic-work detail.

My only modifications were to: (1) knit the ribbing at the start on size 5 needles, down one size from the main body of the hat, and (2) add a knit round before and after round 10 on the crown decreases–just to pull the stitches a bit closer together as the crown closes.

Breck is one hat I believe deserves a LOT more attention than it’s gotten so far. There are only 6 projects posted on Ravelry and three of them are mine! Maybe the sport weight scares people off. But this hat could also work well in DK weight. It’s a cool hat and if you want it to be beanie style, you just stop knitting the body a tad sooner.

This next Ravelry freebie, Irma Hat by Anneta Gasiorowska, totally surprised me. I knit it because a hat-of-the-month group on Ravelry chose it as our group knit-along one month.  I decided to go along with the crowd even though I thought the zigzagging and a ton of make one lefts and make one rights would be a pain. I even dug out what I took to be an unpleasant colorway of Berroco Comfort, thinking I’d at least further my stash-down efforts.

It was a bit more work than most hats. That’s partly because my brain often gets confused by the combinations of left leaning and right leaning make 1s. But wow! I think it worked up great. I even now think that the colorway is pretty. And check out the crown:

That much cool detail on a free pattern makes me incredibly grateful for the generosity of the knitting universe.

More Doubles

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Recently I’ve been fascinated with knitting doubles. I’m enjoying how the same pattern works up in different colorways or in different yarns. You’re looking at Alex Tinsley’s Fructose. I’ve knit both my Fructoses in Malabrigo Rios. These two colorways are big favorites of mine. The green one is lettuce. OK, you’d have figured out that’s the green one. And the purple/orange/red is Archangel. Beats me why. But it’s a wonderful colorway, especially for one-skein projects. That’s because there seem to be very big differences between skeins. But every skein I’ve seen is wonderful.

The strong vertical lines combine with strong horizontal ones to give the hat wonderful structure. And the sweet bonnet-like slit in the back leaves room for a pony tail or allows the hat to be worn low on the back of the neck to keep out winter’s chill.

Each Fructose took 52 grams. I should have had 48 grams left. But both my skeins were “light.” I’ve read that a skein with 10% more or 10% less is considered acceptable. I suppose I should be magnanimous and accept that if sometimes I get more I shouldn’t grouse about getting less. Maybe I would if I ever got more than a dollop of yarn beyond the ballband amount.   Both these skeins were shy about 8 grams.

With my mission of not wasting yarn or leaving it to languish in my oddments bags, I decided to knit up a pair of toddler-sized The Thinker hats.

Susan Villas Lewis has come up with such an excellent all-sized pattern. These are the 8th and 9th Thinkers I’ve knitted. In the toddler size, there are three lines of easy cable that ring this hat.

It’s a seriously excellent use of yarn.

That’s also true of Clara Parkes Hill Country Hat. Hill Country is a bulky-weight freebie available on Ravelry. It’s also included in Parkes’ excellent book The Knitter’s Book of Wool. Hill Country is another pattern I return to whenever I have about 110 yards of bulky asking to be knit up. This brown one is knit of Brown Sheep’s Lamb’s Pride Bulky.

One of the strengths of the hat is that, depending on the yarn and sometimes the colorway, it’s a definite unisex design. This white one is knit in Valley Yarn’s Berkshire Bulky.


As ever, hats don’t get beyond first base with me if they don’t have well-behaved crowns. Plus they get extra points if, like Hill Country, they have something interesting going on in the crown section. I think this swirl works well.

I knit this next pair quite awhile ago and didn’t get around to showing them off. This is Elena Nodel’s bulky-weight freebie, Tega. An excellent pattern. It’s only available in one size, adult, but that’s easily adjustable by using a less beefy yarn weight and smaller needles.

My first Tega is knit in Reynold’s Lopi Bulky. I used size 6 for the ribbing (that was pushing it) and size 9 for the body of the hat. Those extravagant cables are wonderful. And the thoughtfully planned crown is a winner for sure.

As for what head will wear a bulky-weight Lopi hat, it needs to be a very cold one. And a head with a very high “but it’s scratchy” threshold. I washed it in Eucalan to try to tame the itch factor, but not with much success. It’s much softer but still scratchy as heck. And I actually have a high tolerance for such rustic yarn.

If you decide to knit Tega in a good superwash bulky, like this Valley Yarns Superwash, there won’t be any complaints about itchy heads. The yarn also has great stitch definition for a bulky, which is a big plus for this pattern.

At some point, I promise, I’ll stop concentrating so much on heads and will let your eyeballs feast on something else. Not today though. I recently hatched plans for how my knit hats can tempt teens to put something on their heads and, with that, my hat knitting went into high gear. Even Glasshead is beginning to voice boredom with all these hats.

This one is Agnes Kutas-Keresztes’s freebie, Christian. My gray Christian is knit in about 130 yards of Berroco UltraWool.

And this pink one is knit in Plymouth Encore.

Crowns can make or break a hat. Check out this wonderfully organic one. If you’re up for an easy, rewarding (and free) pattern, definitely consider Christian.


Just when you think I can’t possibly be assaulting you with any more hat twins, I’ve still got more. This set is Susan Mills Harriet. Quite uncharacteristically, I knit my Harriets in exactly the yarn the pattern calls for: Classic Elite’s Liberty Wool.

The multi-color Liberty Wool means that every Harriet will be unique. My 50 gram balls weighed closer to 40 grams, which was a disappointment. But two balls still ended up with two Harriets, just one large and one medium.

The hat is meant to be a beret. But I think most heads would want to wear it as a beanie.

I made some sizing modifications on this next pair of hats, but I am totally liking the look. It’s Benjamin Matthew’s On the Grid Beanie. I was lucky enough to secure a copy of the pattern during its few days when Matthew released it free. But this hat pattern is totally worth the 6 dollars he’s charging for it now. By the way, to keep an eye on designer short-term freebies, join the Free Stuff Rocks (f/k/a Lovin’ the Freebies) group on Ravelry. The group forum will also alert you to new forever free patterns and to discounts that are available from designers.

Back to On the Grid. Both mine are knit in Plymouth Encore. The pattern calls for a more lightweight worsted and 19 stitches to 4 inches using garter stitch as the gauge. Encore required some sizing mods.

I knit 10 rows of ribbing. In Encore, needle size 6, that was about 1.5 inches. I knit 4 repeats of the triangle pattern instead of 5, which gave me a bit over 6 inches of triangles. From the start of the decreases to the top added about 2.75 inches. So, even modified, this is quite a long beanie–9.25 inches. But I can already tell that this quick knit is a pattern I’ll return to regularly.

You know that means it’s got an interesting crown.

GlassHead is weeping. Maybe you can hear her? Both Fructose have already been given away and she wanted to hang on to the Lettuce one and keep wearing it for awhile. I’m consoling her at present with the Encore Sour Apple On the Grid, a similar colored hat.

 

Every little bit counts

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My 2019 resolution was to try hard to knit all usable quantities of a colorway before I proceed to a new yarn for a new project. Kind of “finish your peas before you eat dessert” thing. Well, except that Schoppel-Woole Zauberball and Cascade Yarns Superwash Sport are hardly the peas of the yarn world. Apologies, to you pea lovers, but peas taste terrible and I bet somewhere deep down you know that too.

So, first I used a smidge of the Daffodil colorway to knit my Annita Wilschut Vera bear a rain hat.

Perfect. That was in the summer of 2014.

My Daffodil languished. Next, in the fall of 2018 I knit Wolkig in my black/gray/white Zauberball.

I broke into the  Daffodil for the cuffs of my adult moc-o-socs.

Such a great pattern by Rebekah Berkompas.

Then, with most of the leftover Zauberball and a dainty amount of the Cascade 220 sport Daffodil, I knit Justyna Losorska’s freebie beanie, Fasolka. I followed her instructions exactly, except that I went my own way on the color combination.

I see this sportweight hat as a great success. It even has an excellent crown, with no hint of the dreaded pointy beanie syndrome.

The Zauberball colorway worked out so excellently, I will be indulgent and give you another view.

What next to knit. I’d been eager to give Cecelia Compochiaro’s “sequence” knitting a try. My first attempt was her Swirl Hat, using her spiral sequence method.

If case you haven’t heard about or tried sequence knitting yet, let me intrigue you. All the patterning on this hat repeats the same 10-stitch sequence. Yep, the diagonal slices, separated by a few rows of stockinette, are several rounds of the same sequence worked over and over again, ignoring the end-of-round marker. The shift in the direction of the slice happens magically (or so it seems to me) by a minor adjustment to the number of stitches in the round that happens in the stockinette section.

There was even enough Zauberball left for a right-sized pompom.

My Cascade 220 superwash sport hadn’t run out yet, so I couldn’t quit on it. This next hat is Susan Villas Lewis’s Vitruvian Man.

The Vitruvian Man, at least the one who isn’t a hat, is DaVinci’s drawing of a man stretched out in a circle, with his arms stuffed into the top of a square and his legs stuffed in the bottom of a circle. You know, this guy:

It’s a fun motif to knit. The entire hat is very cleverly designed.

Check out the great crown.

I have a big gumball sized ball of Zauberball left. And what’s left of my Cascade 220 sport isn’t quite a golf-ball sized ball. Every useful bit is used up.