Zen Gnome Hat

I love custom orders, though at the same time it's a little anxiety-producing to take someone else's idea and turn it into a finished item.  Especially when the customer is not a knitter, LOL.  One of my clients saw a newborn hat that was elfish, but the tip was held to the body of the hat by a flower.  I wasn't going to show the original at first, but thought it might be interesting to show the comparison.  The photographer is also from Ontario, so that's nice for me to support.  I don't know who made the hat, but I will try to find out!

She was going to be doing a newborn photo shoot and wanted two of these hats, one with a button and one with a flower (girl/boy twins).  The big issue (for me)?  The original was made with a yarn that blended softly from one colour to the next, though it came across as stripes.
She wanted to come over and see all my mohair-ish yarns.  Well, my "studio" is not really a studio anymore! 

 First there was the flooding I showed earlier (in May?).  The rest of the basement has been gutted, bit by bit, and now it's time to get over to my side.  Originally this wasn't going to happen for awhile, but plans change.

All my bins of yarn are actually not in this room, but even though I tried to organize them when re-packing/moving them, it's just not a situation to bring a client to.

So, I spent an afternoon going through the bins in the freezing basement and picked out some striping yarns, some gentle coloured yarns, and some mohair-ish yarns and schlepped them to her!

We came up with a design and I got to work.  I didn't like the tan yarn we chose, so I made an executive decision to get something else.  The other yarns were lace weight/DK solid coloured, smooth mohairs, and the tan was Patons' Divine, which I use in the layering blankets for it's lumpy, shady, bulky, textured look.  It would have been fine for a brim, but it was also to appear further up in the stripe pattern.  I switched it out for Patons' Lace Sequins, but I had to trim all the sequins off :(

 See how out of scale the Divine is?  I was also practicing with blending from one colour to the next.

 What a perfect button find!

 By not sewing the button down, it'd allow for adjusting size, or for knotting the tail.  See the pretty sequins I had to snip off? :(  LOL.  We had a few emails about that!

 I was struggling with the flower, trying to create something simple but looked like the photo she had found.

 

I made a couple different flowers, one I didn't show here was in the cream, with more open loops.

Isn't that the sweetest picture?  The boy was 8lb, and the girl, 5lb!!  Jennifer is a wonderful photographer and I LOVE when our collaborations result in fulfilling her creative vision!

The only downside--the two hats together (including buttons), weigh only 35gr!!

 

Yarn In:  7837gr

Yarn Out:  35gr + 4799gr = 4834gr

Balance:  3003gr more brought IN than out

Costs:  $227.61/207 days = $1.10/day