Peasant Cap: From Spinning Fiber to Finished Object

I spun the yarn for my latest hat during Tour de Fleece 2018 and Spinzilla 2017 (the only Spinzilla I’ve done). Both started out life as 2 ply fractal spun yarns, but I ended up cable plying them both, which essentially means I made the 2 ply yarns into center pull balls and plied the yarn with itself.

I started the Do-It-Yourself Peasant Cap by Melody Parker Narvaez last weekend (a free pattern on Ravelry). I was going to make it entirely with the first yarn shown above. To make the hat, first you knit a 1×1 rib tie, then pick up the stitches for the crown and, separately, the brim, from the edge of the tie. So I knit the tie in the first yarn, making it shorter than the 40 inches specified in the pattern; I planned to sew the tie down rather than making a functional tie, so I only made the tie long enough to go around my head with about 2 inches of overlap.

Then after I picked up stitches for the crown, which is supposed to be knit in moss stitch, I ran out of yarn before even getting to the decreases. Luckily, I had this other similarly colored handpsun in my stash so I restarted the crown and did 1 row stripes. The surprising thing to me is that I chose two rovings in similar colors at different times (the bottom one I got at Shenandoah Fiber Festival 2017 and the top one I bought online) – they work so well together in the crown of this hat!

I mentioned that the crown is supposed to be in moss stitch, but that wouldn’t have worked well with 1 row stripes, which I felt were necessary to blend the two yarns together better, so I switched the crown to seed stitch, moss stitch’s more petite sister.

Because I knit the tie in yarn 1 and combined both yarns for the crown, I felt it only fair to use yarn 2 all by itself in the brim. The tie is flipped up and stitches are picked up from the same edge that you pick the crown stitches up from, then you pick up a few more stitches on each row as you knit the garter stitch brim. One of the things I really like about this hat is the brilliant and functional combination of 3 different stitch patterns in one item. I think my version turned out quite well!