A knitted shawl and hat

25th January 2017

Written by judith

Did you notice the shawl and hat that I’m wearing on the profile picture on the right? Let me tell you all about it!

Every year Lana Grossa has new and seasonal colours of their Olympia yarn. The yarn is so beautiful! I have been using it before for a few crochet items like hats and scarves. It’s a mixture of wool and acrylic fibres, variegating in colour and thickness. It works up so nice, though the crochet items are a bit dense. So I decided that this time I would knit with it.

It actually took me a while before I started this little project since I wanted to finish something else first (keeping down the number of WIP’s!). And because these balls of yarn are so beautiful that you could put them in a basket and use as a home decoration item. Let’s admire the beauties first…

I chose a simple knitting pattern for a triangular shawl. It’s probably the most simple pattern available… just knit stitches… back and forth. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of brainless knitting, it’s so relaxing!

My shawl grew and grew… (And kept me warm already by the time it was a reasonable size and lying on my lap while knitting.) After about three and a half balls of yarn, it was big enough for me.

I decided that I wanted to make a matching hat, so I searched the Internet for patterns and inspiration. I found a lovely pattern called ‘The Vermonter’ by Spiderwomanknits (free pattern on Ravelry). It’s a fairly basic pattern, so ideal for me as a not-so-experienced-hat-knitter :-). It took me three attempts to knit the hat in such a way that I liked it (I made it a bit bigger and I wanted a large foldable brim for warmer ears). It turned out great!

Though one thing was missing on my hat… a POMPOM*! Well, the thing is that the hat in the pattern does have a pompom and I planned on making one but I needed the right tool for it. It hadn’t arrived yet by the time we had that magical winter weather (perfect for taking hat and shawl pictures). So I decided to take the pictures (or have them taken by my husband) and do the pompom later.