Sustainable hat!

      We're a couple of days into thanksgiving break (boy, am I thankful for that!) and I didn't have a chance to start my sustainable hat while school was going on, but it's going now in full swing! 

I found a great pattern on this website http://knittingpatterncentral.com/directory/hats.php for the "twisted latticed cabled hat" but the gauge (stiches per inch) of the yarn was not quite right for that one so I decided to go with the "winter femme cabled hat" which I'm pretty psyched about because it's quite pretty. I've never knitted in cables before, and it's supposed to be pretty difficult, but it's going pretty well so far. I wouldn't say it's difficult, but it's definitely annoying. 

Photo courtesy of my phone

To create the cable pattern you literally just switch groups of stitches around, and for this specific pattern you have to do it 9 times around when it is a cable row. Very annoying. I'm surviving though, mostly because I hand it off to my sister Ros for the 8 plain rows in between the cable rows. She is a very good sweatshop worker. I pay her in Wheat-thin crackers and grapes.

I originally had intended to find a pattern that uses very little yarn so as to be supremely efficient, but since I recycled the sweater for the yarn I have a lot of it and could probably make approximately 4 of these hats from this sweater(this hat needs less than a sleeve's worth of yarn). Cable knit garments require more material than other simpler patterns because of the way it bunches up. The benefit, though, from using more material and a bunchier pattern is that the garment will be warmer. So if anyone's trying to make really reallyyyyyy efficient hat. . .you might get a little cold out there. I figure that the fact that I'm recycling the yarn offsets the amount that I am using for this hat.