Knitting confidence

Another finished item to report. I've made my Mam a hat for mothers day. Not sure how long it's going to be until my family get fed up of me making them things...but I'm still thinking it's nice to get something that you know someone has worked on, over numerous hours, with just you in mind.

At some point last year I made my Dad a chunky black hat with earflaps. I keep getting reports that my Mam keeps wearing it, and that she wishes the earflaps had a button on them so she could fasten them under her chin. I've never seen her actually wearing it, but the pictures in my head are horrific!! I decided that I'd make her one which is a tad more feminine and fulfills her earflap/chin fastening requirements - not to mention improving the pictures in my head....

So, after I mooch around Ravelry (it's been a while since I looked anywhere else!) I found the perfect pattern in 18 Seconds Before Sunrise. It has lovely cables, earflaps, i-cord chin ties. Perfect! Well, almost perfect...

...there was one thing about the pattern that I definitely wanted to change - the cables were all in stocking stitch, even though they extended from partial cables. I decided that I wanted to continue the stocking stitch, as well as the reverse stocking stitch, down through the earflap so that it looked seamless.

Once I read the pattern, I discovered that the hat was created first, then the earflaps added as a kind of afterthought and the stitches picked up. I instantly decided that I did like the sound of that and wanted to knit it all in one go as one piece.

It took me a while to work out how to achieve both of my pattern changes. I wasn't sure how to go about earflap inclusions - knit the earflaps from the top down on a provisional cast on and graft it onto the main hat? knit the hat top down and just continue on with the earflaps? knit the earflaps bottom up and join them to the hat on the cast-on row? That last one is actually the way I did it. I then had to look up and learn how to make the increases in the right directions so that the earflaps grew wider from the i-cord in an neat way. This tutorial was spot on: www.knittinghelp.com/videos/increases, I used the M1L and M1R. Worked brilliantly.

I know it's not brain surgery, but I was chuffed with myself to discover that I actually have the skills to do this. Then I thought about it some more and I realised that I do seem to do it quite a lot - just small scale stuff, but I often tweak patterns. Almost without thinking. The whole thing reminds me of a conversation I had with my Mam a few months after I started knitting. She's knitted forever but was stunned that I could make up my own patterns (my first knitted things were made up designs, it took me a while to build up the confidence to follow a pattern). She has always followed a pattern to the letter, never made any changes or improvements, wouldn't dream of it. It kinda surprises me that she thinks like that.

Anyway, I've wittered on far more than I meant to. Just wanted to log that I was chuffed with myself - for future reference. Oh, as well as to show my finished mothers day hat!