mission fix-a-hat

well hi there friends. I discovered that, in the last two years on Blogger, I filled up my photo quota (oops), so I was trying to find a way around that tinsey problem before posting again. Because it's a little hard to post pictures of things you've made with out... the pictures. Am I right?

 so the one on the right is a little blurry, sorry about that. My grandma bought me a mitten and matching knit beret lo these many moons ago, with some begging and pleading involved on my part. The mittens have always fit, but the beret? Not a snowball's chance of staying on my head. Even after trying to felt it. Which makes me wonder exactly what the fibre content is, because the woman who made it owned the sheep, sheared, carded, washed, dyed, spun, and knit the stuff herself. In any event, this was back in the days before I was possessed of knitting skills myself, of course, so I never wore the hat. It lived with all the other winter accessories, and I ignored it. Until this earlier this fall, when I discovered, after the just keep knitting fiasco with the red pony tail hat, and found a hole at the top and thought to self, "Self, we know how to knit now, we can fix this thing so that it actually fits." Which is precisely what I proceeded to do.

I used size US 8 10" round needles, since this is sort of a bouclé yarn. The beret (which I don't have a picture of) had the diameter of a 12" pie pan, so when I frogged it apart, I knew that even if I wasn't conservative with my height, I'd still have something left over. Because of the hole at the top, there were  some bits and pieces of yarn that ended up having to be scrapped, which I turned into a tassel for the top, which you can sort of see in the picture. I did not bother trying to trim the ends of the tassel to anything uniform, just letting it fall where it may. I used a basic, free hat pattern from Ravelry, with a cast on that gave me a decrease divisible by 6; and I had to frog it twice before getting close to an accurate size for my head with a bouclé.   

Now I have a hat that fits that I will actually wear, and a small amount of yarn left over. I'm of a mind to find something brown and tweedy that matches the cuffs on the mittens and hat to make a matching scarf, since there isn't enough left over from the hat to make a full scarf. I do have some gorgeous variegated alpaca that I could use to stretch the left over, but I would still like to find something tweedy.