The Wee Dragons

I finished the dragon hat last night. I'm quite pleased with it but a little worried about the fit. Now, I swatched, as you might recall, so the hat is, approximately, the size I intended it to be. It just seems so big! The thing is that my niece has a rather large head, so I'm hoping for the best. If it doesn't fit her now, it will eventually.

Project Stats:

Pattern: My own (cobbled together from other hats I have made)
Yarn: Dale of Norway Baby Ull in green and peach. Funny story. I was in a yarn store last weekend, the one that's organized by color and that I don't go to very often, and I asked one of the sales women whether they carry Dale of Norway and she said, "I don't think so. What kind of his yarn are you looking for?"
Needles: Size 3 dpns. Bamboo. All my needles are bamboo.

About the pattern. Yeah. It's a great pattern (hah! hah!) I crack me up. I love the yarn. Love Baby Ull. Really, what's not to like? It's incredibly soft, reasonably priced, and superwash for those messy toddler accidents. I will say that it is a little limp and therefore stretches a bit when blocked. This was not a problem for me, however, since I had washed my swatch.

The one thing about knitting this hat that made me slightly insane was that there were too many stitches to fit on three dpns until I started decreasing for the crown. This meant that I had to knit the first four inches of the hat on four dpns. That killed me. I hate knitting in a square instead of a triangle. I feel like that extra needle makes my knitting dangle in a dangerous fashion. I constantly worry about stitches popping off the ends of the dangling needles while I'm knitting. That actually did happen a couple of times while I was knitting this and it nearly gave me a heart attack. Seriously. I hate it when the stitches pop off the end of one of my needles. This is one of the reasons why all of my needles are bamboo. They're sticky so the stitches are much less likely to slip off.

The pattern worked out well. I was even able to join the cast on edge to the rest of my knitting to form the picot edge without using a crochet hook. I really like the way the dragons look and all in all it was really a simple pattern. The only hard part was creating the dragon chart, but Stephen really did all the work there.

So, if you want to make one of these yourself (and please feel free) here's the basic recipe:
Cast on as many stitches as needed to fit the intended recipient. I cast on 140,
knit two inches in stockinette in the round,
knit a picot round (yo, knit one, around),
knit six more rows of stockinette*,
knit the ten rows of the dragon chart, evenly spacing the dragons around the hat, Since I had 140 stitches, I knit six dragons total, with three stitches between each dragon, except in two places I knit four stitches between dragons
knit one row stockinette,
knit one row stockinette in the contrasting color,
knit one row in stockinette alternating one stitch in the main color and one stitch in the contrasting color, around,
knit one row stockinette in the contrasting color,
knit two more rows stockinette in the main color,
join the cast on edge to the knitting by knitting one loop from the cast on edge together with one stitch on the current row around to form the picot brim
Start the decreases for the brim. If you have 140 stitches then you should:
knit 18, k2tog, place marker, all the way around. If you have a different number of stitches then you should find some number that your number of stitches is equally divisible by and then decrease equally around.

1. knit one row even
2. Knit to two stitches before marker, k2tog, around

Repeat these two rows until you have 7 stitches between each marker, knit one more row even,
then knit round 2 until you have one stitch between each marker.
At that point you can cut the thread and draw it through to cinch up the top, or do like I did and do a couple more k2tog's and double decreases until you are left with three stitches total, then cut thread and draw through the stitches. Three stitches seems to be the magic number for me. Three stitches leaves basically no hole at the top. Anyway, then you can weave in the ends and block. It's lovely and should fit a three year old with a large head.

*If you're getting a different gauge than me or if you're making your hat bigger or smaller than mine then what you really want to do is place the dragon so it is a roughly equal distance from the picot round and the round where you will join the cast on edge and to the rest of the hat.

Other important information if you want to make this hat:
Gauge: I was getting 7 stitches to the inch and 11 rounds to the inch on size 3 dpn's.
The dragon chart is 20 stitches wide x 10 stitches high.

Really, this is a very basic hat with a picot brim and a fair isle patttern on the brim. It could be changed to make it bigger or smaller. In fact, I'm thinking making one for myself (maybe in pink? with green dragons? Cute!)