On The Needles: City of Emeralds Hat

Do you ever get an itch to create something?

You know that feeling where you have the vaguest of vague ideas of what you want to make, without knowing the exact thing it is? That's how I was feeling in the run up to casting on for this hat.

I bought a ball of each colour of the Yarnsmiths Full of Beans DK yarn a while back but hadn't yet done anything with any of it. Full of Beans was a range of ten different variegated yarns, with a marled effect.

All of the pretty colours!

When I finished knitting the kids' teddies, I intended to go on to knit some doll clothes, but the needle tips I needed were tied up on another hat pattern. Instead I found myself drawn towards the organza bag containing the Full of Beans yarn.

With that decided, I needed to choose the project. Easier said than done.

I felt that the yarn would lend itself to something with a stitch pattern giving lots of texture and I felt like I wanted to knit a hat or a cowl; something with minimal making up required at the end. After a bit of searching, I kept finding myself looking at various colourwork effects, like stranding and mosaic knitting.

In the end, I narrowed it down to a hat pattern, using the Jumping colourway paired with black. I just had to pick an actual hat pattern. I narrowed it down to three and let my husband select the one I should go for; he picked the City of Emeralds pattern.

Teeny tiny bit of knitting.

I'm just at the very beginning of knitting it right now, so it's at that wonderfully wonky, nothing to see here sort of stage, but I took a photo of it anyway, just so in a few weeks from now we can all marvel at (hopefully) how much better it's looking.