After an attempt to squish and reblock that elephant hat, I realized it was useless.There were too many oops in it to fudge: the gauge was really off AND it was over-stretched in the blocking process. I had to undo and rip everything out. Just look at the difference between the visor section and the template. The knitted part of the visor should not be about 25%-30% bigger than the template. The gauge in the Oops Hat was about 6 sts x 9 rows. The pattern gauge should be 7.5 sts x 11 rows.
After I ripped out all the pieces, I measured the hat body. OMG it was huge, at about 9.5-9.75″ for one piece. The hat is constructed of 4 pieces: 2 wider hat body pieces and 2 skinnier panel pieces. The shirred panel measured at about 8-8.5″ each, which means that the Oops version had a head circumference of about 35-36.5″ (89-93cm) around!! Seriously, elephant!!
After I ripped out the hat, I wound the yarn only my swift and blocked the skein to get all the kinks out. To restore some of it’s springy qualities, I beat the wet hank of yarn a few times on the counter (got some good agression workout), then hung them to dry in one of our guest bathrooms.
To make things easier when I reknit, I kept each section in its own hank and marked them using different-colored ties.
When I looked at the pattern for reknitting, I realized that while there definitely were some knitter error with the gauge, there was also some designer-error. The designer-error probably would have been caught had my test knitters finished on time. Due to unforeseen reasons 1 dropped out and 2 were really late on their deadlines. They were supposed to finish right when the sample knitter was about to start, but apparently that did not happen. Maybe this hat had a hex on it.
Anyway, the designer-error occured in the miscalculation of the CO sts. My error would have made the hat bigger – probably make the medium-sized sample fit an Large or X-Large head rather than a medium head (unless the medium head has big hair).
After I fixed and recalculated my errors, I reknit the hat and even remembered to take some photos of the finishing work so that I could put up a tutorial for Amelia Earhart and I have photos to do the tutorial for this hat when it’s ready for release. BTW, this hat is called Eleanor Roosevelt.
A sneak preview of Eleanor Roosevelt, which I wore when I went to the American Film Market trade show on Nov. 8 (I’ll write about that in a later post).
