Dad's Christmas Dog Walking Hat

Inner Hem Detail
Originally uploaded by tdgirl.

In November, I asked my dad what he wanted for Christmas, and he said that he wanted a warm hat for walking the dog, because Earl (his fur hat of the classic Russian variety) was not doing very well, and was definitely showing his age. *

During our Skype conversation, I grilled him about his hat preferences, to establish that wool was ok, patterns were ok but only if they were masculine, he wanted the brim to fold up and that a hemmed, folding brim would be even better, blue, red and black were acceptable colors, stripes were not preferred, but if I need to, I could use them, he wanted a pompom.

The Friday after Thanksgiving, we went to the yarn store in Excelsior to find yarn that was the right colors for him, soft enough, in a weight that I wanted to use, and all of those other intangible qualities of yarn. I learned that he doesn't like the handpainted yarn. And with the Malabrigo that I kept offering, he said, "That seems too soft to be a hat." and "That is very pretty yarn, but I wouldn't want to wear it on my head." The blue and white yarns are Cascade 220 (blue is a Heathers color) while the red is Berrocco Ultra Alpaca. I chose the red as the brim color because it was the softest. Also, I didn't want to take any chances with combining different yarns in the main body of stranding.

I actually started knitting this hat the week before Christmas, and it was washed and blocking on the morning of December 24th. the most difficult part was all that stockinette to knit the brim in both directions and the most fun was knitting the message into the hem. There are some caught floats showing through in the blue background of the snowflake, but I don't know how to prevent those. If I knit that chart again, I would use a Norwegian lice pattern instead of trying to put in the sorta-snowflakes. Look how even my stranding was for the X pattern!

*Apparently, long ago, there was a product marketed as "Earl the Dead Cat" or somesuch thing. My mom, at the store, when my dad bought this hat, said that it looked like he had a dead animal on his head, and the conversation led to the furry product from the 70s. And until this year, I thought that it was Irrel the Dead Cat, as a play on the word Squirrel.