Hats!

I've been knitting and knitting, but still failing to post. Then I finally got around to taking a some photos a few weeks ago when it was cool enough in the mornings to actually consider briefly donning a wool hat outside in Texas. Here are the hats and their stories at last.

I finished the Even Better Bucket Hat back in late spring. It was my first project using the ever popular Malabrigo Merino Worsted yarn in the American Beauty colorway. I am now IN LOVE with this yarn. It is dreamily soft and comes in amazingly vibrant colors. Plus, the yarn is hand-dyed by a women's cooperative in Uruguay.

In this project, I tackled the provisional cast-on for the first time with uneven success. Fortunately the join is on the inside of the hat (the brim is doubled), so no one is any wiser.

After the Bucket Hat, I worked on a number of projects simultaneously over the summer. Some of them are still in progress, but I finished another two hats pretty close to each other in Septemberish.

I finished the Amanda Hat first (I think). Another Malabrigo project, this time I knit with a variegated yarn called Alpine Pearl. This was an interesting project because it was such a completely different architecture from the bucket hat. The knotty stitches in the Amanda hat gave it a firm, plush shape--the hat will stand up on its own! It's also interesting to see how the variegation plays out in the stitch pattern.

The Raisin Beret is the third hat. It was a quick knit...but I also think I was gaining speed by the time I took on this pattern because even the lace sections seemed surprisingly easy after the Amanda hat. I was hoping this would turn out as a good everyday fall hat and so far it has worked out quite well and now lives in my tote bag for the days at the office where the a/c still thinks it's summer.