Monday, January 29, 2007

The Pirate Life


Ahoy! I finally finished the "We Call Them Pirates" hat - just in time for my friend Todd's visit. I made him the hat to commemorate his first visit to Gasparilla. I say first visit but really one Gasparilla will pretty much do for most people over 25. I was however impressed with Todd's bead catching skills. The St. Petersburg Times said 400,000 people came to watch the invasion and I believe it. Bayshore was packed.

Back to the hat: it was the second We Call Them Pirates hat I made the past two weeks. The first hat I knitted with the recommended needle size. I used the same yarn, Dale of Norway Hauk (same colors even). I checked my gauge like a good little knitter. But when I was done with it I could barely fit it over my head. My knitting got tighter when I used two colors. My swatch was with just one color. That means I either need to do stranded gauge tests for stranded projects or learn how to do stranded knitting correctly. I went up one size, US 4, for the second hat and it worked much better. No longer felt as if pirates were squeezing my brain.

It was too warm to wear the hat for Gasparilla, but Todd graciously agreed to model the next day, when it was a bit cooler:


We even took the hat out for some pirate-y shuffleboard action before Todd had to fly back to DC. Pirates love shuffleboard:

3 comments:

Christy said...

Pirates and shuffleboard..what could be a better combo?

KBlicious said...

arrrrrr, your hat looks fresh off the page of a magazine, you go with your stranding self, i'm uber impressed!

Kristen said...

Hi! Your hat looks so good! I want to make this hat for my husband, but he has a 24" head. Could you recommend how to scale up this pattern to a larger size? What were the final measurements of the hat you made with size 4 needles instead?

Thank you so much!