FO: Bristol Hat

I am on a roll! Two finished projects the last week of August. Watch out September, I’m gonna keep this truck a’rollin’. I am pumped to finish up my Pontos Cardigan and my Folded Pullover and get those WIPs into the Finished section of my Ravelry projects page. I cannot explain how delighted I was to be able to check off this project as well, and so quickly.

I’m sure there’s no need to hide the Amy Christoffer’s that exudes from every knitterly pore of my being, so when she approached me about test-knitting her new Bristol Hat, I couldn’t say “yes!” fast enough. The photos she showed me of her sample, worked up in Quince and Co.’s Finch, demonstrated the classic Amy design elements—comfortable and wearable with a focus on easy to knit texturized detail.

I went stash diving for my sample, since this hat takes up so little yarn. I had a bit of this Malabrigo Sock in Rayon Vert lying around, and ended up only using 132 yards of it. I have enough left over to knit two more hats! While I was knitting, and especially once I realized I had so much yarn left, I kept thinking that this would be the perfect pattern for knitted gifts (you know, if you have people on your gift list who live in climates where hats are actually worn). You could knit three of these with one skein of Malabrigo Sock!

And you could knit them quickly. Start to finish on my Ravelry page, this took 5 days to knit. In actually, I didn’t work on it at all for about two of those days, as I was finishing up Cecilia. So really, three days of a couple of hours of knitting in front of the television is not too shabby for a finished project.

The pattern is really pretty easy to memorize once you get the hang of it (and it starts with two inches of ribbing, the epitome of “mindless knitting”)—I was able to watch a couple of episodes of Supernatural while knitting the body, which in hindsight was not necessarily such a good thing, because I am a wimp and that show scares me a bit (I have to stop watching when it gets dark and watch something else before I attempt to go to bed, or I would NEVER SLEEP).

If I were to make this for someone else, I’d probably use a solid or semisolid yarn, but for me, I love the the way this colorway knit up. And hell, I probably will knit myself another of these in a less dramatic colorway, because this hat is my Perfect Fit—slouchy, deep enough to cover my ears, loose enough that I don’t feel like my head is in a vise but tight enough I’m not worried about it falling off.

Need a new cold weather hat? My vote is for Bristol.

(Me? I’ve got the knits, I need cold weather. COME ON, FALL, WHERE ARE YOU?)