Fibers on Friday: It's Been HAT week!

The sweater is finished, so I decided to obsess over some quicker projects. I spent hours looking through Ravelry. I'd been to their site before but didn't create an account, so I wasn't exposed to the huge amounts of patterns they have online. I decided on a pattern called Poppy to knit for my one daughter. It's a "Shaker" "Flapper" style hat. It's so adorable in the pictures, but I'm not sure I'm loving it and I'm not sure it's really my kid's style...we'll see. I'm going to add a little knitted flower to the side flap. Also, it looks a little small.

***edited to add*** I frogged this entire hat last night! It was way too small. So, I started it over with some extra stitches and I'll add a few more rows of pattern. I could tell it's gonna be cute, though!

I also knit up a simple hat for my husband. The basic hat pattern is calculated by using Crazy Aunt Purl's method. I also got caught up in reading almost her entire blog. She's hysterical.

Things I've learned about knitting this week: How to do a provisional cast on.
Things I messed up on this week: the provisional cast on!

The provisional cast-on is used as a means for saving "live stitches" that you're later going to go back and "pick up". You cast on using waste yarn that you can later remove from the project, exposing the stitches you want to pick up and knit. In this case, I went back and picked up stitches to knit the ribbing of my daughter's hat.

There are nice, neat methods of doing the provisional cast on. I did not know this. I just cast on as usual, which made it hard to get rid of those stitches later. You can search for the correct way of casting on on YouTube.