I spin and love working with my own yarn, but I do not (yet) spin sock yarn. I received a number of skeins last Christmas and have slowly been using them. One skein was a “Hotsox” that knits its own pattern, which keeps a body entertained through the boring parts of a sock. I had some leftover yarn and decided to knit a hat for my granddaughter. This is what I did.

First, I took a length of different sock yarn and loosely crocheted about 60 stitches. I then picked up 50 stitches on #2 double pointed needles from the back of the crocheted chain. No reason to use double points, but I had them handy from my sock adventure. The “back” of a crocheted chain is the side that looks like a series of dashes. The “front” of a crochet chain looks like a series of “v”s.

I had measured my granddaughter’s head circumference with my hands and did a stockintette stitch (one row knit, reverse row purl) until I had the measured length of what looked like the beginning of a scarf. I also slipped the first stitch of every row, and knit the last stitch of the purl row. This gives you a nice finished edge as you go

It would have been easier to have a flexible tape to measure her head, but I didn’t have that tool when I had her head available. I also didn’t have a tape measure with me when I was knitting her hat.

When I was close to the required length, I made sure I was ending with the same color with which I began and on a purl row. I snipped off, leaving a very looong tail. I then started to unravel the crocheted chain from the starting end and picked up the stitches one at a time.

The red variegated is the crocheted chain, the green my starting color.

I had 50 stitches on two separate knitting needles, one at each end of the “scarf”. I threaded a darning needle on the looong tail and sewed the two ends together, imitating a knit stitch.

My imitation of a knit stitch is picking up two stitches on one side, then on the other side begin with one from the prior two stitch combo, plus a new one. It makes sense when you look at regular knitting and see how the stitches fit together.

So now I had a tube with a hidden seam.

The next step was to transform the tube into a hat. My sock yarn had a nice pattern for this, in that it naturally gave me six stripes of green. That meant that I could sew all the green stripes together at one end of the tube, giving me a charming pattern at the top of the hat.

The bottom rolled, but that was a nice touch too.

I, of course, had no way to know that this hat would actually fit its intended victim.

Perhaps I am posting a success today because it is the first day in a long time that I have seen glimmers of my youngest daughter showing again. I think her medication is beginning to help her come down out of her manic cycle. She isn’t back to base level, and may never be. But it’s is so good to see her good sense of humor reappearing.