My Mountain Hat Design Contest - Spiral Path Beret, Shine On Beanie, and Embarrassingly Easy Hat

To celebrate the North American release of their My Mountain line of yarns,  Schachenmayr is having a design contest. Contestants are invited to design a hat using one of the big, rugged, out-door inspired My Mountain yarns. The company was gracious enough to send me yarn to make two different hats to enter in the contest.

Spiral Path

 

There seems to be a spiral path going around my mountain, on which I come to the same issues again and again, but at a different level. Sharing, caring for myself, setting goals, and grappling with the expectations of others are all vistas from different sides of my mountain, but they mean different things at the elevation of a child, teenager, young wife, and now as a mother.

Another thing I keep happily returning to is purple, like the pretty purple shade of Boston (70% acrylic, 30% wool, 12 sts/4" on 8.0 mm needles) used for this slouchy beret featuring a spiral lace pattern.

Shine On

 

 

One of my mountains is sleep. I am seeing far too much of the stars these days; first late at night, and then again before dawn the next morning. While I miss getting enough sleep, I do enjoy getting to see so much of the stars, like the one on the front of the Shine On beanie.


This hat is knit in Bravo Big  (100% acrylic, 8 sts/4" on 10.0 mm needles) in a deep, indigo blue and has an intarsia star worked in a neon yellow shade of Lumio. The "shine" around the star is worked with the reflective thread untwisted from a strand of Lumio.

 

 

Embarrassingly Easy Hat

 

The skein of Lumio was so generously sized that I had more than enough left over from the Shine On hat to make this quick little hat for my daughter. This has is, as the name suggests, embarrassingly easy to knit. In fact, I finished most of this hat early one morning in the short time before the kids woke up.

 

I love a good, complicated knitting pattern, but when the climb up my own particular mountain gets particularly tough, I'm a sucker for a super-simple knit. This hat is composed of a long rectangle that is folded in half, then sewn down the sides. Braided tassels are sewn to the top corners for a little extra swing.

Patterns for all three hats are coming soon!