A Very Silly Hat

I don’t often do commissioned work these days. People aren’t usually willing to pay what it’s worth. And my spare time is such a rare commodity, I’d rather spend it knitting stuff I want to knit rather than stuff I’ve been paid to knit.

(Newer readers may not realize that I spent about a year knitting and selling Jayne Hats on eBay. By my estimate I knit somewhere around 300 hats in that time. It was a great little side business, and it made people really happy, but wow.)

However, I recently received a request that I couldn’t pass up. A friend-of-a-friend is a professional strawberry rancher (or whatever the term would be). He raises strawberries and sells them at the farmer’s market on south Whidbey Island.

He requested a strawberry hat sized for an adult, so that he can wear it at his stall. He offered to pay money, but I offered to trade him for a flat of strawberries instead.

Unless you live in northwestern Washington, you have probably never had our strawberries. They are AMAZING. But they don’t ship well, so they are very much a local delicacy. It’s still far too early in the season, but I am already salivating at the thought!

The hat really is hat-shaped, I just didn’t want to overstuff it and risk pulling it out of shape.

I started by pulling out my copy of Ann Norling’s Fruit Caps pattern which I bought yearssss ago. (If memory serves, I bought the pattern to knit a hat by request for a little girl who is now a teenager. Time flies.)

Then I changed everything about the pattern except the color chart.

Changes:

After much deliberation I decided to NOT include the seeds on the first part of the hat. The embroidery creates a very palpable bump on the back of the hat, and I thought that would be pretty annoying on your forehead.

Now we play the waiting game…