I turned in the hat and mittens yesterday to the yarn shop that is collecting them. The sun cooperated by shining in the morning; I wanted to get some photos of the hat with a low-angle sun so that the pattern stitch showed up really well.
Ta-da!
(Unfortunately, the low-angle light also shows off every uneven, wonky stitch really well, too.)
Hat.
Yarn: Berrocco Vintage (50% superwash wool / 50% acrylic) leftovers from my colorful socks and the recent baby sweater. The lavender is Louet Gems superwash worsted leftover from my kimono sweater.
Needles: US#5 Addi Turbos.
Pattern: Sunflower Tam from Knitting Nature by Norah Gaughan.
Mods: The pattern calls for casting on 90 st in worsted weight yarn on US#6 needles for the child's size. I have knit a lot of worsted-weight hats, and that seemed to me a bit large for a child's size so I used #5 needles instead. The Berrocco is a light worsted weight, so it all worked out fine. Looking at the 400+ tams on Ravelry that have been made from this pattern, I noticed a lot of comments that the hat was too large. Yep, it would have been.
I had planned to knit (what I thought were ) the traveling stitches with the maroon yarn, having them travel across the variously colored stripes. But once I read the pattern a bit more carefully, I found that those phyllotaxis lines were created with mock cables (k2tog and leave on left needle, insert right needle tip between the stitches and knit the first stitch, drop stitches from left needle), and it was too much for my meager brain to cope with to do them in a different color than the working row. I tried doing them as twisted traveling stitches, but that, too, was more putzing than I really wanted to do. So I just went with the stitch pattern as written and contented myself with the stripes. (And finished the hat in an afternoon, as previously mentioned.)
Mittens.
Yarn: Same as above.
Needles: Same as above.
Pattern: Target Wave Mittens from Knitting Nature by Norah Gaughan.
The thumbs on these stick straight out to the side, which looks pretty darned strange. But they seem to fit fine; the adaptability of knitted fabric wins again :)
