Big head...erm...hat

After my disastrous selling weekend, I lost my knitting mojo! I just did not want to pick up them needles anymore. Sewing and spinning went down the drain, too. I just wanted to do cleaning (never happened though), paperwork (happened sporadically) and mooching about (happened a lot). I managed to write though, which was the only creative thing I did.

I felt a bit lost, if truth be told. Those hands that were normally busy now rested uneasily on the chair when watching the news. I wasn’t quite sure what else to do, other than pick up fluff from the floor. I could of course, have whipped out the Dyson, but that would have been far too much effort…

However, this afternoon, my knitting mojo returned! I suddenly wanted to knit a cloche hat, something I had wanted to do for some time. I looked at hat pictures on the Internet to get an idea as to how this peculiar shape is created, and then started drawing and jotting down patterns. This might sound very arty and methodical, but it is actually not. My patterns never quite seem to add up at first, but still work somehow after some trial and error, with a tweak here and a tweak there…but there is never a neat mathematical equation, where everything adds up. There are far to many, ‘decrease two stitches here’ and ‘add one’ there to even something out – I don’t think my patterns could ever appear in a knitting magazine!

Cloche hats are strange beasts. A lot of hats featured under ‘cloche’ aren’t cloches at all, but sneaky slouchy hats, ordinary hats and big floppy sun hats that somehow managed to masquerade themselves as cloches. Cloches are very restrained hats. They don’t have a ‘tea cosy’ shape, but are longer and rounder at the top – and their brim has a very restraint but distinct flare. I wanna funk up da cloche and have some mad ideas of big flowers and massive bows to go with the modest cloche.

So I burst out in knitting, and I think my cloche might indeed look like a cloche. However, it is big again! Even when I am using less than the recommended number of stiches for the needle size, it is still a lot bigger than the average size. It seems, because I have a big head (figuratively and physically speaking), I can’t knit small or normal sized hats, they all mushroom into something big and bold.

So, the cloche I am working on will be big. Hope it will be a cloche, and not turn out to be a glorified sun hat after all.

I shall find out soon…

PS: The hat in question is now available at my store...