Hats, Hats, Hats and more hats...

Socks, scarves and mittens are so yesterday, I've moved on to hats.

I'm working on Hat #7 now, wonderful red Jacque Cousteau hat that is a breeze to knit up (well I haven't hit the decreases yet, but the instructions don't look all that daunting). I've also figured out why my hats were all consistantly big... I completely forgot about Negative ease...

So lets say someone has a 22 inch head, I was knitting a 22 inch hat, not a 21 inch hat that would "stretch" to fit that 22 inch head. No wonder everything was large (Not to mention sometimes my swatches don't represent the true guage of my knitting, and many thanks to Jean Wong for pointing out to me that I was knitting on needles consistantly too large for the yarn I was working with. Those 2 bits of information have helpped me immensely.)

So now, I need to remember to knit with negative ease for hats. You want hats to be snug. All I need to figure out now is how snug they need to be :) 1 inch negative ease? 2 inches negative ease? 1.5? I think perhaps it all depends on the pattern at hand.

So... since I now have so much more insight into it, I have 4 more hats to "redo", perhaps I can find people with larger heads so that I can "gift" my prototypes to.