18 Apr A Design Journey…part 1..
Come…take a journey with me…a design journey.
Everyone experiences events that changes their life…how we perceive things…future plans…or simply how we approach everyday life. A recent event for me was the diagnosis of cancer for a family member. And because of that, designing hats for chemo patients is an idea I need to pursue – not just want to – in my heart need to…and something I had not given much thought to before.
Over the past month I’ve been testing out different design ideas, some knit & some crochet. Cancer affects so many families that inviting my readers to join my journey just seems the right thing to do. So come along…let’s design a chemo hat together….
The first step for any design is the design idea itself. How should it look? What weight yarn? Needle size? Stitch patterns?
For this hat I went looking for the right yarn first. It has to be soft, yet easy to work with and have sufficient body to hold a hat’s shape. As it turned out I happened to ‘meet’ (through a Facebook post) an indie dyer – Yvonne, who had the perfect yarn. Her Oregon based company is Lavender Sheep, and the yarn is a 100% superwash merino that she hand dyes. And she graciously agreed to provide yarn support for this chemo hat design. The colorway she sent is “Berry Pie”…a lovely mix of shades & tones of lavender.
The next step was to decide on the shape of the hat. One idea I had tested was something similar to a pill-box hat, although more slouchy. How to give the hat that look? Here’s a couple of sketches (I don’t claim to be the best sketch artist, kinda suck at it actually) of my concept.
It seems to me that if I knit the hat body on the bias, it will have the ‘slouchy’ feel I am looking for. 
And my idea for the top, or crown of the hat is work it so it both forms a fairly flat top like a pill-box hat while also gathering the hat body. Ending up with a star design would be the result of the decreases used to shape the top.
How would you work out these design details?
Next stop on our journey….swatching for needle size & stitch pattern(s).
Until then ~ Happy Knitting ~ Jean
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.