The Trouble With Beards

One of my nieces asked for a beard hat, and I've always wanted to make one, so I of course said yes. She's in high school and wanted it for her boyfriend. I like the look of knit hats better for adults, and especially for guys, so I decided to knit the hat and beard.

The hat part was easy, just a basic beanie in their school colors. I decided to make the stripes a little more interesting by purling the first row of every color change.

I don't have a lot of practice knitting hats, so even though I knew how to do it, I was pretty excited that it came out well. The beard was another story.

I decided to use this pattern here. It was the only knit pattern on Ravelry that I thought looked good. I had bought sport weight yarn for the hat, so I had to double up since the pattern was written for bulky weight. I couldn't help but hold it up to my face every few rows, and everything seemed fantastic, until I got near the end. I'm unsure if I read the pattern wrong or if there was a mistake, but I didn't have as many stitches as I should have. I ended up being short one row but I didn't think it would make much of a difference. I attached it to the hat with some clips and tried it on, and I was so excited!

I immediately went to show my husband, who started laughing. He asked me when he could bring it to our niece, and as I started telling him how I still needed to stitch it all together, this happened.

Thanks to my cool new clips, I was able to try out different ways of attaching the beard. Sadly, no matter what I did (tighter, looser, further from my temples) the darn thing started to droop. Since this was my first beard hat, I can't say for sure that this would happen every time, but I have a feeling that since knit items are so stretchy jaw movement would pull down almost any beard.

I'm curious to know if crochet beard hats have the same problem, so that has been added to my To-Do List. But I think it's pretty safe to say that beard hats are pretty much only useful for hilarious photos, and not for wearing full time anyway.

I decided to make the beard button onto the hat, so her boyfriend can wear it and get some funny pictures, but take off the beard if it gets annoying. Hopefully he gets some more use out of it that way!

Celtic Love Knot - New Favorite Crochet Stitch?

I'm on Pinterest a lot. Probably too much. Mostly because of the mobile app, if I'm stuck under a sleeping kid and my phone is within reach I can feel as though I'm being productive by pinning a bunch of crafts I may never attempt. Yes, I realize that my logic is flawless.

A while ago I re-pinned something cool called the Celtic love knot. Link to pin:  here.
Then last week I was browsing Wal-Mart and saw some yarn that caught my eye. It's Lion Brand's Amazing, and I just loved the colorway. My helpful 2 year old ripped off the label already, but I believe I picked up Pink Sands. After I got home with it I decided that it was the perfect yarn to try out the Celtic love knot with!

The picture on the pin was of a scarf, and I thought that's what I would try too. So I clicked the pin, and was taken to a website in Dutch. Thank goodness for Google Translate, because I was able to figure out where to click to find the video. Direct link to video:  here.

After watching the beginning of the video a few times, I felt like I got the hang of it and kept going. Until I realized that my scarf was off somehow, it didn't look like the purple one in the picture on the Dutch site. When I looked closer at the purple scarf, I could see that they didn't do any triangles on the edge, they just kept making squares. But in the video she only does 3 sides on the edge. I decided that I liked the look of the purple one better, so I ripped out my work and tried again. After half a day of working on and off, my scarf was done!

I really like the look of it, and it worked up so quick. The hardest part was getting a consistent gauge in the bigger stitches, but I realized that if I stuck my thumb in the hole with the hook it was a big enough loop and it was really easy to maintain. Once I finished it I decided to hold it up and look at those gorgeous stitches. And then I realized why there were triangles on the side in the video.

When the stitches were pulled down by the weight of the yarn, they elongated and the scarf basically shrunk in half width-wise. I'm guessing that only having one stitch along the side to make a triangle, rather than having two to make the diamond-shape, would have stopped it from being pulled down.

I still think it looks pretty cute though, and it makes for a nice light-weight scarf. I'm not quite a fan of how the colors pooled, so I'm going to make up a solid color scarf next. I might make several for gifts since they're adorable and perfect for the mild Louisiana winters.