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Knitted Tassel Hat

Materials:
One skein of Hobby Lobby Yarn Bee Fleece Lite
Size 13 needles.
Yarn needle for sewing up hat and weaving in ends.
Crochet hook to assist the attachment of the tassels.

Hat:
Cast on 44 stitches.
Knit in a 2×2 ribbing (knit, knit, purl, purl) for 2 inches.
Switch to garter stitch (knit both sides of your work) and knit for approximately 6 more inches or until hat is a total of 8 inches long.
Bind off.
Sew up side seam then sew up top to close.
Weave in ends.

This image shows how the top seam should close as well as the tassel placement at each top corner.

Tassels:
To make tassels cut 6 strands of yarn approximately 12 inches long. Fold three in half and pull the fold through the stitches of your knitting and back out on the top corner of the hat. The crochet hook can help you poke them through your knitting. Take the loops off the hook and slip the tassel ends through the loop and pull tight to complete the tassel. Repeat for the other corner. I recommend making a small knot in the yarn at the bottom of each tassel to stop it from fraying.

This is an open source pattern and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You are free to use the pattern, build upon the pattern, and make the object the pattern provides instructions for for non-commercial purposes only (personal use and charity crafting is allowed). You are required under this license to give credit to me (a link to my blog, my email address, or the pattern is sufficient) for any content you post which contains this work and if you make changes you are required to release the pattern under the same license with credit to original author. Pattern created by Christa Casebeer, web: http://linuxchic.net , email: linuxchic@linuxchic.net , Ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com/people/linuxchic

This is a simple, mostly double crochet pattern for making arm warmers for those with small hands and tiny wrists. I am petite and typically have to modify patterns for arm warmers and hats or they bag on me so I decided to make my own arm warmer pattern. These are worked in the round. I wrote the pattern as I made them and have not test crocheted the pattern since. Please let me know if you have any trouble or notice errors so that I can correct it. Thanks!

PDF version available for download & printing here. This pattern is also available as a project on Ravelry.

The approximate finished size should be about 7 inches around at the top by the knuckles and 6 1/2 inches at the bottom after the wrist decreases. There is little stretch at the starting chain (near the knuckles) but quite a bit of stretch throughout the rest of the wrist warmer (about an inch or little more in stretch). The finished length is 8 inches.

Supplies:
Size F (3.75 mm) crochet hook
Sock Yarn – Approx. 200 yards give or take a little. The yarn in the picture is Hobby Lobby Yarn Bee Walk Away in the Footsy colorway.
Sewing needle for weaving in ends if you don’t want to crochet them in.

Special Stitches & Abbreviations:
BPDC: back post double crochet – Dc worked around the back post of the stitch. Yarn over, insert hook from the back side of the work right to left around the post of the indicated stitch on a previous row;
yo and pull up a loop (3 loops on hook), yo and draw through two loops (2 loops on hook), yo and draw through two loops (1 loop on hk)
FPDC: front post double crochet – Dc worked around the front post of the stitch. Yarn over, insert hook from the front side of the work right to left around the post of the indicated stitch on a previous row;
yo and pull up a loop (3 loops on hook), yo and draw through two loops (2 loops on hook), yo and draw through two loops (1 loop on hook)
DC Decrease: double crochet decrease – Work a dc in the next stitch without completing the very last step (2 loops on hook), then dc in the next stitch without completing the last step (3 loops on hook), yarn over and draw through all the loops. Decrease made.
Sl. st.: slip stitch
Ch: chain
Dc: double crochet
Yo: Yarn over

Hand:
Ch 30 loosely. Making sure not to twist the chain, slip stitch chain together.
Row 1: Ch3. Dc in each chain. Sl. st. to previous ch3 to close the round. Ch2.
Row 2: Ribbing: BPDC in first DC, FPDC in next DC then BPDC in the following repeating from to the end of the round. Sl. to previous ch2 to close the round. Chain 2.
Row 3: Dc in each dc to end of row. Sl. st. to previous ch2 to close the round. Ch 2.
Row 4-6: Repeat row 3.

Thumb Hole:
Row 7: Turn work rather than continuing in round and dc across to next to last stitch (leaving one stitch in previous round unworked). Ch2. Turn.
Row 8-9: Dc in each dc. Ch2 turn.
Row 10: Dc in each dc. Chain 1. Sl. st. across skipped stitches to first dc and join. Ch2.
Row 11: Return working in the round. DC in each dc then across ch1 joining the round with a sl. st. to top of previous ch2. Ch2.
Row 12-16: Dc in each dc. Sl. st. in top of previous ch2. Ch2.

Wrist Decreases:
Row 17-19: Dc in each dc making 3 dc decreases throughout round joining each round with a sl. st. to top of ch2.

Arm:
Row 20-24: Dc in each dc joining the round with a sl. to top of ch2. Repeat this row for as long as you want your warmers to be. (I didn’t add any more rows to the ones I made in the pictures.)
Row 25: Dc in each dc joining the round with a sl. to top of ch 2. Cut thread and weave in ends.

Now make another one!

• How to Crochet a 'Rag Rug'
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• Sock Links (With descriptions)
  Sock knitting links, tips, and troubleshooting
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Photo by Ethan Hurd

When our oldest was in 8^th grade the public school he attended sent home forms for career paths – maybe a dozen choices – and told us to plan his course schedule for the next 4 years according to our chosen pigeon hole. How he was supposed to plan for a career when his life thus far had been exposed to so little at thirteen years of age. In junior high I despised history thinking it to be the driest and least interesting thing I could ever be forced to study. Up until high school I had only been exposed to state approved American and Missouri State history lessons and frankly, it was terrible. By the time I entered college I discovered ancient and modern world histories and well written American history. That exposure turned me around on history forever. I may not have plans to become a historian but who knew how inspiring history could be.

People reinvent themselves as they go through life. I like to visualize people as katamari and we are just rolling around picking things up and letting things stick to us. As we grow we are exposed to more knowledge from schools, people we encounter and our own personal explorations. Reinvention is a natural process in our personal evolution. The information we have defines the choices we make.

How can a person know what they want to do if they don’t even know what there is to be done?

For the last few years I have started to take time on at least a weekly basis to reflect on things that are important to me and to shift my goals as required. Learning and self-reliance have always held a golden place at the top of my list.

I have learned:

…that while it’s true that you can catch more flies with honey it doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice yourself in the process.

…that I learned more from my parents than I ever thought I possibly could.

…that learning what not to do is sometimes more important than what to do.

…not to be possessive of my ideas if it means that someone is inspired by them, improves them, and builds upon them.

…that it is my responsibility as a member of the human race to be productive and to contribute to my community.

…that no contribution is too small and that greed destroys communities.

…that being a woman doesn’t make me less of a person and having awesome homemaking skills is a strength not a weakness whether male or female.

…change is necessary even if not always welcome.

We are about to embark on a new adventure and I hope that I am able to  share it with you in the same vivid detail that I am about to live it.

That is a loaded question. No srsly, it is. I could write 17+ blog posts about what I am going right this very minute. I have always been big on notebooks with project lists and to-dos but my to-do list is really out of control right now. I have lists with sublists and it’s all on paper because I love writing on paper. Please don’t tell me how you know of a product or work for a company or whatever that will make my to-do lists computerized and graphed – I LOVE paper!

Work is insane right now as we prepare for the fall semester. I am in the middle of a VMware infrastructure upgrade and adding new VMware products into the mix at the same time on top of a bunch of other new implimentations. The VMware projects are organized like a house of cards, if one project doesn’t run smoothly it is going to foul up the rest of them.

On the hobby front I have completed my DIY spinning wheel project (will blog about it more thoroughly another time) with only minor tweaks here and there being done.  I have been busy unraveling sweaters and cutting up t-shirts to respin into new and wonderful yarn. I have been trying to par down my pile of clothes to refashion and have completed a few projects that will go up into a new Etsy store. My biggest problem with my creative endeavors is that I always want to keep everything for myself and I am trying to convince myself that while these new finished objects are indeed awesome, I am better off selling them to fund my hobby habit so I can make more awesome things. I have been knitting and crocheting like a fiend too.

On the home front the garden is coming right along but the tomatoes are taking longer to ripen than we have patience for. We are battling the annual guinea pig summer mite outbreak like champs and surviving the seemingly weird weather we have been experiencing this summer in the midwest. I am still progressing with my slow move to a more sustainable life and we are also in the middle of another big home project but that is secret for now. Can’t give everything away yet.

On the family front I have 4 kids to enroll in 4 different schools (stupid yearly enrollment processes), school supplies to buy, school clothes and shoes to purchase and closets to purge.

I have had a couple of people ask me if I have stopped the technology thing and my answer is no. I am still a sysadmin but I do spend a whole lot less time sysadmin’ing at home than I used to. It just hasn’t been my priority but I help out anyone that asks whenever I can. I have gotten past the point in my life where I feel like I have to prove myself and besides, I just have better things to do with my free time than tinker with servers and run up my electric bill. I still keep up, I still support things, I am still reading about new technologies and I am still working on open source causes – I just am not really talking about it all that much.

So there you have it, my latest update. Lots going on in a pretty vague post but you know, I have things to do.