Hat on Top, Coat Below
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House Hats-o-Rama
March 30, 2007
The bag of shoes and boots is still riding around with me, but this morning I did get something else on my to do list done: I boxed up some knitting and shipped it off to its new home. Just about the time the Red Scarf Project was wrapping up for this year, a fellow Harry Potter fan asked the hp_knitting community if anyone would be interested in making and donating HP-related items to be used as raffle prizes for her American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life Team. Since I had plenty of yarn in house colors leftover from other projects, I figured I’d do a few caps–those are quick and easy. Two months later, here’s what I ended up with:
Starting at the top and going around clockwise:
Hufflepuff in KnitPicks Andean Silk (55% alpaca, 23% silk, 22% wool) in Yarrow and Pitch. Okay, I admit that this was not made from leftovers pulled from my stash. I’ve wanted to try this yarn for a while and this was a good excuse to buy a few balls. It’s very soft and drapey but did have a few poky bits.
House Unity in Plymouth Encore (75% acrylic, 25% wool). This was mostly from stash, with the exception of the yellow, which I bought so I could try a different line up of colors than I used before. I’ve lost the little scrap of paper on which I wrote down the shade numbers and didn’t feel like digging the balls out to check. I’m pretty sure they’re: 217 (black), 517 (blue), 1604 (green), 174 (red), and 1014 (yellow). The yellow is oranger than my House Unity ideal, but it’s not too bad a look overall.
Ravenclaw (movie colors) in KnitPicks Swish (100% superwash wool) and Plymouth Encore. This was all stash. Swish doesn’t come in a light grey, so I used Encore (shade 130, now discontinued) for the stripes. The two yarns work up at about the same gauge so that was okay.
Gryffindor in KnitPicks Andean Silk, Cranberry and Yarrow. The yellow could perhaps be a bit deeper to get the proper moody Prisoner of Azkaban look, but I wasn’t going to order a separate ball of another color just to do two stripes. My yarn madness isn’t that far gone.
Slytherin in Plymouth Encore. This used up the last of the green (shade #204) I originally bought for my house scarf. Too bad I didn’t come across the light grey until later; I bought what I thought would be plenty when I did see it, but now I’m into my last ball of it.
Ravenclaw (book colors) in Knit Picks Swish, Dark Navy and Copper. From what I’ve seen, “bronze” is open to interpretation; since it’s a copper alloy, I figured a yarn called “Copper” would be fine.
All of these were based on this pattern, though the exact number of rows in the cuff and the body vary some depending on how well I was keeping track and what looked good to me at the time. The Gryffindor is bigger than the rest because I didn’t swatch the Andean Silk (I know, bad knitter) and didn’t realize it works up bigger than the other worsted weight yarns I’ve been using. The hats are pretty stretchy, so I’m sure each of them will fit a range of head sizes regardless of the variations.