Sea Foam Hat

For some reason I felt like making hats recently. According to Caroline I have a right little cottage industry going on. :-)

I've so far made 2 beanies and 2 cloche hats. This is the 2nd of the cloche hats. I am not quite happy with the first one yet, so it still needs a little work before I show it here. However, this one (all my own design) turned out well.

I've used the most gorgeous wool blend in sea foam colours. There's everything from a pale mint green to a teal to a leaf green to a sky blue to a dark British racing green in there:




The top of the hat has been crocheted and the brim has been knitted. I prefer it this way as the knitting adds a different texture, but also helps the brim to curl up nicely.


I've added a needle felted flower brooch for interest:



The flower is attached with a teeny round brooch back to the hat which makes it more versatile than it being sewn onto the hat permanently, and it also allows the hat to be washed:



This hat is a present, but I will make more which will go into my Etsy shop or you can order your own custom hat here. Just drop me an e-mail with your requirements and I am sure we can sort something out.

Knitting Bag - Sari Silk

Here it finally is - my knitting bag!



I wanted something to put my knitting in whilst I wasn't working on it as I often work on more than one project at a time and needed somewhere to keep current projects safe.

It's a story and a half and took much longer than expected. I got the recycled sari silk from an online wool shop but only got two balls as I wasn't sure how I'd like it. It took forever for this first lot to arrive (2 weeks) due to holiday and supposedly to problems at the post office, and when I finally started I realised pretty soon that 2 balls of wool wouldn't be enough. I ordered more and it took another week and a half for that to arrive. Normally, I'd put a link to the wool shop here but I can't honestly recommend this shop. Although the wool is fine and pricing okay, the delivery times are just not up to scratch for the UK. It forever surprises me that some internet shops don't realise that their biggest disadvantage is that customers pay and then have to wait for their order to arrive. The quicker the order arrives the more likely is the customer to order again. Two to four days is reasonable, I believe, for the UK. A week and a half or even two weeks is not reasonable.

However now it's finally finished. Sari silk is fairly easy and fast to knit and I love the effect of the different colours. It's almost like an abstract landscape. However, it's also fairly heavy (the sari silk for this bag weighs 400g). I'd not use it for much apart from bags and possibly hats.

The bottom of the bag has been crocheted in the round. I then took up the stitches with a knitting needles to make up the body of the bag. Along the top is a row of button holes for the ribbon to go through. I used lace weight rough silk (double) to create the crochet lace around the button holes and along the opening rim of the bag. A pale blue silk ribbon and needlefelted flowers in pale blue and red finish the bag. It's quite large so will hold all my needles, crochet hooks, wool and bits of paper with patterns on it.

Below is a close-up of the felted flowers.



Here's the ribbon against the lace at the top and the knitted sari silk:



Here's the crocheted border at the top.


Below is a detail shot of the knitted sari silk. You can see all the different strands that make up the yarn. They are the loose ends of saris, collected in industrial mills and spun into yarn.