Peppermint Hat and Scarf Set

by Kelly

Here's a hat and scarf set that I made for this year.

The pattern for the hat was one I found on The Midnight Knitter, but the scarf design is my own. If you haven't been to The Midnight Knitter site yet, I really encourage you to pay a visit. Her knitting and crochet patterns are fun, contemporary, and sometimes free.

The scarf pattern is easy peasy. It's just stockinette stitch (knit one row, purl one row) for four rows, then purl one row. The final purl row makes a 'purl stripe' across the front of the fabric. There's no border because I wanted it to curl up naturally into a tube so that it looked more like a peppermint stick.

I used super bulky acrylic white yarn, some ancient variegated red, white and green yarn, and size 13 needles. I managed to get that neat 'peppermint stripe' look by purling the final row of the above pattern with both yarns held together. At the end of the 'purl stripe row', I dropped the variegated yarn and went back to knitting only with the super bulky white.

When I made the hat, however, I ran into a problem - I was knitting with different yarn and different needles, so the hat came out far too lacy (full of holes, in other words) to actually be useful as a hat. I mean, any poor kid who walked around in the winter with this hat on would just be asking for a terrible case of the flu.

So I did some online searching for a solution. Here's what I found: 

                                        Thrumming

Thrumming is basically a way to add a felt backing layer while you're knitting. This would work equally well for crochet. There's a great tutorial showing this at hello yarn. However, thrumming requires loose wool or wool roving, and I didn't have any of that.

                                    Double-Knitting

This would have been great if I had started from the beginning, but not so great to start in the middle of a project.

                                    Adding a layer

Buy fleece or some other warm material, or even a cheap off the shelf beanie, and sew it inside the knitted hat.

And then the best solution became pretty obvious. So I bought an off the shelf hat from Ebay and sewed it into my hat as a liner.

That's not cheating, is it????

All in all, though, I had some fun, learned a lot (most importantly, that a hat should not be full of holes) and sold the finished project. Not a bad outcome, really.