Two Hats, Too Cute

I made 4 baby hats for the Optimist Club.  We are having a contest to see who can knit the most hats.  Clearly, I have lost this one by a land slide.  However, it’s hard to knit hats for newborns when you have 2 very cute girls at home that ask if that hat you are making is for them.  They batt their big blue eyes and smile a sweet little smile and say, “Momma, is that myyyy hat?”  Somehow I have to tell them that it is for a newborn baby that needs it more than they do.  “But the next hat will be for you, dear.”  And so, I knit more hats for the girls who do not need any more hats.  It’s a good thing that hats are the comfort food of knitting for me.  I don’t know what it is about hats, especially considering that for more of my life than not I refused to wear a hat unless it was absolutely necessary.  Hats weren’t cool when I was growing up.  It’s taken me until I became a knitter to realize how much better a warm head is than a cold one!!  Plus, now I can make exactly the kind of hat I would want to wear. 

 The Optimist Hats that I knit (all being donated to the local nursery), were all knit from leftover yarn.  It feels good to use up some of the odds and ends that have been sitting around.  Most of the skeins didn’t have enough yardage left to knit an entire hat from.  The total number of hats our club knit this month is  110.  Most of those hats were knit by one man using a little circular knitting loom.  The individual member who knits the most hats will win lunches at our meetings for a month.  The team (we have 2 teams) that knits the most hats will receive homemade cookies.  Guess I’d better get baking soon! 

The Girl’s Hats

Shy Child

 One thing that you never want to do is take a picture of Lily in the morning.  The smiling child that you saw in the first picture suddenly turns into the most shy child on earth.  She loves her hat, but doesn’t want to show it off before school.  For those of you with a discerning eye, or at least an obsession with Three Irish Girls, will recognize the yarn as Galenas Merino in the Maureen colorway.  It’s some of the yarn that I got when I attended the TIG workshop in October.  The yarn is held double to make a bulky weight yarn.  I used the Very Berry Bonnet pattern.  You can see the line where I seamed the hat, but Lily doesn’t really mind. 

As soon as I finished Lily’s hat, Addie asked me where her hat was.  I immediately cast on a Foliage Hat.  This pattern has been in my queue forever, but I never have seemed to get around to knitting it until now.  I love the hat!  It’s knit with the same Galenas Merino that I used in Lily’s hat along with a strand of Dye For Me.  The Dye For Me adds a bit of sparkle that is all Addie.  She’s my drama queen and she loves anything sparkly.  This hat was so cute I almost kept it for myself!  I definitely see a Foliage being made in the near future for me. 

I could wax poetic about the Galenas Merino, but then again I have a thing for yarn done out of a super soft single.  Just see my obsession for Malabrigo as evidence.  The colors (as in all the TIG yarns) are gorgeous, Sharon has an eye for beautiful color combinations.  The colors in the Maureen are not wimpy, they’re well balanced and perfectly suited for little girls.  In fact, Lily says the reason she likes her hat is because it’s so colorful.