"Cock your hats--angles are attitudes."--Frank Sinatra

This is the tale of my biggest crafting disaster…the purple knit hat with no earflaps.  Argh!  It still hurts my heart to look at it.




The purple knit hat with no earflaps.  I kept it to remind myself

to never get too big for my crafty britches.



Yeah, so, the purple hat thing.  I begin this story by saying that I’m an amateur knitter.  I learned in college when, for reasons I don’t recall, I ended up spending a weekend alone in the dorm.  I bought a pair of needles, a skein of yarn and a book. Then—ta-da—I taught myself to knit.  Well, sort of.  I only knit stitch.  I only do scarves.  And they aren’t particularly well-made scarves.

However, one blustery Friday afternoon in the winter of ’06 I decided I was going to knit a hat with earflaps.  A coworker (a Rhode Island School of Design student being well trained in all things artfully perfect) who was showing off a sweater she was knitting, inspired me.  We chatted a bit about knitting, and at the end of our conversation she photocopied for me a hat with earflaps pattern from a book she had in her bag.  RISD Girl assured me if I followed the instructions carefully, I would have a hat by the end the weekend no matter how inexperienced I was in knitting.



I left work that day full of inspiration and intent!  I bought two skeins of a lovely purple yarn, my first pair of circular needles and everything else my hat pattern called for and raced home to feverishly begin my project.

To this day no one is quite sure what went wrong.  Despite my reputation for skipping steps when reading directions and leaving ingredients out of recipes, I followed the pattern to a T.  I knitted, counted, bound off and observed that my hat was a FREAKIN’.  HOT.  MESS.

It was pretty much shapeless.  Well, shapeless by the standards that it didn’t replicate the shape of a hat.  It was huge.  It looked like a yarn bowl.  I knitted a giant yarn bowl!  I can’t begin to tell you how broken hearted I was.  And maybe I cried a little.  I didn’t even bother with the earflaps.  (Let me tell you, four years ago when this story takes place you couldn’t find a freakin’ knit hat with earflaps anywhere.  You now can’t spit in Target without hitting seven of them!)

When Monday came I took my terrible hat to RISD Girl for inspection.  She, too, couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong.  Her theory: my yarn and its elasticity were the problem…maybe.  We joked I had made a great toaster cozy.  Later that night my husband wore it on his face declaring it a hockey mask while I laughed hysterically.  So, what is the lesson I learned from my knitting debacle of 2006?  I learned to laugh at my crafting mistakes…you know…because they are funny.  It’s as simple as that.