The lovely and clever Escargot hat was published in our Winter issue, which went live in early December. And it seems to have caught on… Â there are nearly 400 projects already, and more being added every day. Â And many knitters are making more than one…
Everywhere we go we see this hat – at one of my LYS this past weekend I saw one finished hat and talked to two knitters who were working on their own.
There are so many fabulous versions – lots of color combos, and some great yarn choices.
Knitty Designer Laura Chau worked one in two great shades of blue
Summerlea worked an amazing version in textured yarns for a different but equally great look. Â She sadly lost it, but reports that another is in the works… We can only hope that the original is being enjoyed by its finder.
NextThursday chose bright snail colours for her version…
GardenKnittr‘s is straight up elegant in grey and cream…
MamaNicoleG created a pair of fab fingerless mitts to match.
Kybosh chose great colors, and when it turned out a bit big, felted it to fit.
And the wonderful and generous Jami created a kids’ version, Escargot Jr.
Jillian has just finished hers – doesn’t it look great!
I think I might have to knit one now…
Am I the only one who doesn’t like these hats?
It doesn’t really float my boat. Mainly because I have an unusually large head, thus I wouldn’t do the hat justice. And the hat wouldn’t do me justice.
Isn’t it wonderful that we have Knitty.com and a plethora of patterns available to us. That way we don’t all become cookie cutter clones!
Also I live in So Arizona, we have about 6-8 weeks of weather cold enough to wear a wool hat. Well at night it does get cold enough to possibly wear a hat!
The head circumference on the pattern is 20″ – that’s 2″ smaller than my head. Are people knitting/wearing this hat with negative ease?
In response to Barbara’s question: for me, my gauges changes significantly when I change from flat knitting to circular knitting, so that I actually had to shrink number of stitches in the crown (I just made a bigger spiral by binding off more stitches and adding a few well placed decreases in the band portion) than recommend in the pattern. {Moral of this story, if you plan to work in the round, measure your gauge in the round}.
Also if you use a really flexible yarn, such as alpaca or a single ply wool, you may find (this may only be true to me, the empress of all things that are bad hats!) that the natural stretch of some fiber may compensate for the lack of inches in the given circumference up to at least an inch. If all else fails, try going up a needle size when you switch to the round. Yes, this will create a looser fabric then intended but it should also increase your gauge enough that without increasing a single stitch, your hat will be larger.
I like the look of this hat, but I’m not sure that it will look good on me. I should look through Ravelry to see how it looks on people whose heads look a bit more like mine (aka, small).
Yeah baby! I’m going to get me some of that. What a great stash buster!!!
What sort of mother am I, that I have two girls loving the idea of making this with the swirl on both sides, so it can be a Princess Leia hat?
The more versions of this I see, the more I’m thinking I should make one of my own.
It has a classic 1930s feel to it and lately, I’m really liking that 🙂
Thanks for featuring me!
To answer Barabara’s question about size, my gauge was slightly smaller than the pattern gauge so I had a 21″ hat. Measuring a favorite hat and tweaking gauge to fit worked quite well 🙂