The Awesome Kitty Hat

All right, I'm still surfing the edge of the Sick, so until it hits me full force, I'm going to act like nothing's happening and maybe it'll forget I'm here. Isn't that how it usually works? heh...

So, I have 3 projects in various stages of completion. There's the Big Orange Monster, who you met earlier, the Toe Socks, which were started while I was stuck on the BOM pattern and awaiting email help from the very cool designer, Helen Hamann, and the soon to be started

Awesome Kitty Hat, aka Kitty Ear Hat:

Dude... how AWESOME is this?!

I became totally inspired to do it after seeing it in this entry in kwgarrett's Etsy shop. Did you go check it out yesterday? You can still buy it! Hell, I might end up buying it if my attempts to make it fail.

I just bought another one of her pieces after I had been lusting over it for weeks and knew I couldn't do it myself:

She made it freeform... No pattern! I couldn't make this in a million years and if I did, it wouldn't be half as cute.

Go buy her stuff Support cool artist people.

OK, with that said, can I TELL you how f&%$in excited I am about making the Awesome Kitty Hat? Sooooooooooooo excited! I just deleted a whole paragraph I had about how I hoped she'd be cool with me trying my hand at making it, (I told her when I bought the other one, which should be here any day now! eeee!,) and not only is she cool with it, she SENT ME THE RECIPE.

Side note: I call patterns "recipes". Always have, and have come to embrace it as part of the dorkiness. My friend, Liza, did it all the time when asking if she could have a drag of a cigarette, "Can I have a sip?" Pretty cute, huh? Love it... Oh, but don't smoke. It's bad for you and will stink up your knitting something awful.

Anyway, DUDE... She sent it to me! How cool is that?! She had made it up and needed practice in writing up her patterns so she jotted it down that afternoon and emailed it. I couldn't believe it.


I have two yarns for it: Trendsetter Yarns "Yosemite" Charcoal Briquette, (the dark,) and Blue Sky Bulky (the red). I swatched them up on size 15 needles and got the gauge of 2 stitches per inch.

I was a little concerned that the red was so even in its thickness, while the dark was nice and funky but I liked the color combo of the original and figured I'd give it a shot.

Again, for all you non-knitters out there, gauge is the measurement of how many stitches and rows there are per inch. It can seem like such a pain to knit up a little swatch so you can figure it out but oooooooh, you'll be so pissed at yourself if you don't and whatever you're making ends up to be twice the size you wanted it to be. Just ask the first sweater I ever made. Ooooo... I should get it out and take a picture for the sheer warning factor alone...

So, last night I was home by myself, the boyfriend being off in Mexico, working. (He's a cinematographer. And also a bastard for getting to go to a seaside resort in central Mexico without me but that's another story.) And having the night to myself, I started on the hat.



Not only did it knit up so easily but FAST and before you knew it, the knitting part was done. Here it is all done and yet undone.










And after the sewing together and starting the blocking, here it is! Cute, huh? Definitely not at the level of the original but I think I'm going to keep trying it with different yarn combos until I get it right.

(Blocking is getting it damp so you can shape it. There's an excellent and very amusing article about it here in Knitty.com.)



Kellie, thank you so much for the pattern and if you ever put it up for sale, I'll most definitely link it here. (Hopefully I'll have more than 6 readers by that point. ;)

I'll put it on tonight when I get home and take some pictures. Oh, and if any of my friends reading this get a slightly funky Awesome Kitty Hat for your birthday or Christmas or something, pretend you never saw this. It's made with love!