Officially Obsessed

If you've read this blog long enough, then you know I'm typically not one to jump on a bandwagon. It's rare for me to knit that sweater that everyone is knitting or buy the yarn that everyone's talking about. That's not to say that it never happens, it's just rare. But in the past week I've been bitten by the marled scrappy hat bug, and I'm not sorry.

These three charity hats have all been knit since last Wednesday, when I started the first while watching the inauguration. You'd think I'd have gotten the urge to do this out of my system with the first hat, but I found myself casting on the next one as soon as it was finished and did it again with the second and third. The only thing that's kept be from starting another is that my elbow was hurting a bit, so I decided to take a brief break just in case it was the hat knitting that was causing it.

There are number of patterns out there for hats like this, but I just did my own thing because I've knit enough hats to be able to knit a basic beanie without a pattern. I know that's not the case for everyone, so I'll be sharing my basic recipe later this week if you'd like to use it (though certainly there are many other basic hat patterns out there, and any one will do the job, so I'm under no delusion that mine is anything special). 

What makes these hats so fun is the color play that comes from using up scraps. These hats were all knit using bits of leftover fingering weight sock yarn held double. The wilder the color combination, the more fun the hat seems to be. The first two hats used leftovers of Knit Picks Felici exclusively. The third, which was completed yesterday, used a strand of ONline Supersocke self-patterning yarn and scraps of two semisolid Miss Babs Yummy 2-ply leftover from my Color Affection (I used up all the light pink and part of the purple). You know what the best part is? These three hats, which all took me only a couple of days each to knit, used up a whopping 864 yards of scrap yarn. I'm going to have to remember these when Stash Dash rolls around again this year.

All the hats were intended to be worn with the reverse stockinette side out, but someone on Ravelry asked what they look like the other way, and I guess technically if you weave in your ends really neatly, they can be considered reversible. But here's what they look like as knit (I've been knitting them in stockinette and turning them inside out after weaving in my ends):

You can definitely see the self-patterning yarn more on the third hat, and I don't think the scraps blend as well this way, but whoever ends up with this hat can decide how they want to wear it! I'm thinking about adding some cowls to the mix, using the same method, and maybe some mittens. That 800+ yards of yarn used has hardly made a dent in the bag of leftovers, but I'm certainly feeling better about my pack rat tendencies now that I see I can do something good with the bits of yarn I never could bring myself to throw away.