If you are a reader of this blog, you may know I’ve been surviving my first East Coast winter – and loving it! I’ll admit, now that’s it’s March and we’ve had the occasional warmer days, I’m yearning for spring. However, I’d take cold weather over hot any day, and I’ve been making the most of my winter – especially with a new-found love for tams! The greatest part of a tam? Function of a hat, minus the hat hair.
Pattern: Grace Lace Beret
Materials Used: Jaeger Baby Merino DK (1 ball/130 yds); size 4 and 9 Knit Picks Harmony Options needles
The back just looks so impressive – what a great pattern! Along with a new fascination with hats, I have a new color love interest – yellow! Like mustard yellow…not pale or too bright, but kind of dirty and muted. This hat only took one ball of this fun yellow yarn to complete – right to the last 2 inches in fact! I bought it from the sale bin at a little yarn store outside of Philadelphia, and was really happy with it. This pattern is lovely, and really quite simple. The beauty of a hat is that it takes very little yarn and not too much time, so you can try a new skill with a lot of commitment. This hat is perfect for trying lace if you never have. Hats are a little tricky to block, an essential in lace knitting, but I just wet the hat with a spray bottle then stuffed it to a dome-shape with hand towels and left it to dry. All-in-all, it turned out a little big, but when my hair is curly and a bit crazy, it fits just right.
And as a hint, it helps A LOT to place stitch markers at the start of every pattern repeat when doing lace – that way you know within the repeat if you make a mistake and end with the wrong number of stitches, instead of the at the end of a long round.
Pattern: Pretty Puffs Slouchy Hat
Materials: Lion Brand Cotton Ease, taupe; size I hook
And as a super-quick little pattern, this tam is fantastic to crochet. It took even less yarn than the knit one, and is very cute. I was actually using up some odds of a favorite yarn of mine – Lion Brand Cotton Ease in taupe, and ran out a little too early. Since the idea was stash-busting, buying a whole other ball seemed unneccessary, so I made it work. Great pattern for that nice-but-pricey small ball of yarn you picked up because you just had to have it (= Enjoy your tams!
