Work in Progress: Flore: Sad panda edition.

meri 2014.12.26

Hark! Meaningful milestone! All of the knitting is now complete!

Smaug has, at this point, had just about enough of being a hat model. Sauron and Toothless find the entire process endlessly amusing.

Unfortunately, I think I discovered an error in the pattern. Furthermore, I didn’t discover it until it was going to be remarkably difficult to go back and fix the issue. So, the hat does not look right. Sad panda.

The Flore hat, as knit by the designer. The ideal incarnation of the pattern. What all Flore hats aspire to be.

Here is a picture of what the hat is supposed to look like, as provided by the designer.

Ignoring for a second the curling of the petals, which will be fixed in post-production, do you see the problem? Here’s a hint: It has to do with the ‘cap’ of the flower.

On the model hat, the petals of the cap point downwards into the rising section of the pink petals. This is achieved by knitting an extra half of a petal’s worth of stitches when finishing a section. The instructions for Section D (the final section before the cap) did not include these extra stitches, and I didn’t realize it until I had already joined Section E (the cap) to the main body of the hat and knit several rows.

To correct the problem, I would have had to tink (that is, unknit) those several rows, and undo the joining of the cap to the hat. (For the knitters, the joining process is achieved a process that is essentially a three-needle bind-off, without the bind-off. You layer the two pieces together, and k2tog one stitch from each layer.)

This would suck. But, I’m willing to do it, if the recipient’s mother deems it necessary. (There’s really no point in a handmade anything if the recipient won’t wear it, you know.) I’ll be sending along the photo, and awaiting a verdict. While waiting, I’ll probably start with the finishing.

There is so much finishing involved in this project.  All the loose ends have to be woven in, of course. And then, you have to tack down each of the petals, a that process generates its own loose ends. Once all the loose ends are dealt with and all the petals have been beaten into submission, you lightly iron the whole hat for final shaping. (Luckily, I received a beautiful little iron for Christmas yesterday!)

Even with all of that, I love this pattern. I believe that there’s enough yarn left over to make the adult version of the hat. Then mom and daughter (recipient of this hat) could have matching hats, and be ridiculous and cute and ridiculously cute all at once.