On the 14th of September, I attended a knitting seminar in Westlake , Ohio given by Bonnie Triola Yarns. There were lots of fabulous yarns and goodies for both machine and hand knitters. There was a display of felted hats that drew my attention because my friend Linda keeps emailing me with pictures of hats and asks if we can make these.I bought a pattern by Judi Meissner. I liked the pattern because it was not knitted circular but it meant that I had to sew a seam. No problem . So I ran out and bought yarn and knitted it on my bulky knitting machine. It took about one hour including seaming. At this point I was going to turn over the felting to Linda. Instead , I decided to give it a try since I heard all kinds of tips at this seminar. How hard can it be? Well, these are the hazards I ran into and I should have known better on a couple of them!
#1. Only knit a hat like this with a solid color. See back of hat(seam)
#2. In sewing the seam I forgot that the brim is turned up and I should have sewn it from the opposite side for for the first two inches.(will label it “irregular”)
#3. I put the hat in a zippered pillow case with a load of whites with the hottest water setting. How pleasantly surprised I was when I opened the washing machine after 10 minutes and saw pink water with layers of bubbles!
#4. The worst hazard was that I was supposed to check this every 10 minutes up to 30 minutes. The washing machine was half filled with water because of the larger load. When I reached in to get the pillow case…oh, by the way, I used lots of detergent so there were all bubbles on surface and I could not spot the pillowcase……now my arms are almost up to the elbows in hot water and I ended up with third degree burns on my arms(well…it wasn’t that bad. It felt like they were burned!) I had to dunk for the hat twelve times by the time felting was finished and my arms looked like lobster claws.
All in all, I think the hat came out cute. I will try another one but I think I will leave the felting for Linda to do. It’s kind of hard to knit with my arms in bandages.(: LOL
My second felting project was a pair of slipper socks-what else!! I knitted the swatch with a tight stitch so they would not felt too much. However, I would use a larger stitch next time because I like it when the knitting stitches don’t show. I am looking for warmth for my feet this winter. I think if they were felted more,they would wear better on the heel.
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