I had no idea what I was in for when I decided to knit a hat. Looks easy enough, right?
I dove in with a haphazard selection of bluish yarns and breezed over the Stitch 'n Bitch Hot Head pattern, not noticing till it was finished that it looked nothing like the example illustration. It was way too loose, and what happened to those rib-thingys? Not to mention that yarn named appropriately "bling."
Ok, lesson learned. Start over, this time with better coordinated colors, but substituting yarn weights with whatever was at the bottom of my knitting bag. The velvety-black yarn I cast on was difficult enough to deal with, followed by the last of a molted gray yarn that I simply couldn't see,and by the time I got to the pink, my stitches had doubled. I figured out how to unravel to a row that's correct, but by the time I got there the whole thing wasn't looking correct. So out it all came.
Third time's a charm, right? Wrong. I thought I'd found my mistakes were simply doubling stitches and not holding yarn tight enough, and marked the appropriate pages in the book for easy referece. This time, I selected a lovely self-striping pink sherbet (purchased as a hank, which I learned the hard way needs to be completely twisted and wound BEFORE you start... but that's another adventure). The cast on was perfect, the second row looked good, but by the third row I couldn't tell where or how to mirror the knit-purl stitches. Something fundamental was off here.
Time to go into the professionals.
I sat in ImagiKnit next to a thin guy in horn-rimmed glasses with my three rows and page-marked Stitch 'n Bitch book, and rambled on about what I'd done so far until he interrupted with the most basic of all questions: "Knit for me."
I crossed the right needle behind the left, looped the yarn, and pulled it through.
"Now purl."
I crossed the right needle in front of the left, looped the yarn, and pushed it through.
Next, the diagnosis: "You're not pulling your yarn forward and back before each stitch. And, watch out how close you're knitting to the needle tips."
Oh, ok. Can save the cast-on?
"Nope, it's better if you start over. Besides, with that weight yarn and those needles, even if you were making a size large hat, it'd be 18". That would be a baby hat."
Ok, duh. Follow the directions. I left the store with four skeins (careful not to select hanks) of purples, white and black in the correct weight yarn, borrowed size 10 needles from a friend, and went back to the book to mark the yarn-hanging-off-the-back and the how-to-spot-a-knit-versus-a-purl pages, and embarked on my fourth hat. I even knit a gauge swatch for the first time, a crucial step I'd been skipping before my other hats.
The swatch measured right and I cast on a few rows of onyx, seguing to knit two techno cozys, before returning to the hat and realizing that the rows were still not looking like ribs. Back to the book to learn about rib stitch, and thusly discovered the last of my lessons: each row starts with knits and ends with purls, so the V's are lined up on top of each other and ribs occur and it looks exactly the same on each side. Wallah! Successful advancement to Hat Knitting Phase.
