A Christmas story

By | December 25, 2012

Years and years ago, Da Hubster started asking questions over dinner one night. “How much yarn do you need to knit a sweater? What do you mean, ‘it depends on the weight of the yarn’? What’s your favorite weight of yarn?” That sort of thing. I was thrilled – he’d never shown much interest in my knitting before.

I was also clueless. It was a couple months before Christmas, and he was gathering the intel he needed to make a very special purchase.

Fast-forward to Christmas day. I open the package to discover a sweater’s worth of sport-weight qiviut. I was stunned. He knew I coveted some qiviut – he’d seen me petting a teeny tiny sample I owned. But he didn’t know that I coveted, say, a single skein of laceweight qiviut, enough for a scarf or shawlette. He didn’t know that no-one in their right mind would knit a sweater out of sport-weight qiviut. What with qiviut being 8 times warmer than wool, you’d have to live somewhere seriously cold – you know, like Antarctica – to be able to wear the sweater. I had to thank DH for his thoughtfulness and generosity, but I also had to make him promise not to make any more special yarn purchases on my behalf.

But what to do with the qiviut? Swatching revealed that it fared best with exceptionally plain stitch patterns, ones that stayed out of the way and let the fiber’s soft halo take center stage. Practicality demanded simple accessories. So, over the years, I knit hats: one for me, one for DH, one for a friend about to go trekking in the Himalayas, and one for a friend going through chemo.

Four very plain hats made a dent in the qiviut stash. They also completely obliterated my desire to knit another plain hat. So my most recent qiviut hat – finished yesterday, thank you – is a little different:

not so plain

Can’t see the qiviut? That’s because the hat is a dubbelmossa, a two-layer hat like Meg Swansen’s Dubbelmossa:

with all the qiviut softness and warmth on the inside

The outer layer is Brooklyn Tweed Loft in Woodsmoke and Birdbook – they’re lovely together, aren’t they? The stitch pattern is a variation on something in Alice Starmore’s Charts for Color Knitting. And the crown shaping was inspired by Claire Boissevain-Crooke’s hats, especially her Alpine Star Hat.

I love how the shaping starts:

green-white-green diagonals become a green-white-green vertical

And how it ends with three diamonds meeting at the top of the hat:

perfect!

I couldn’t be happier with how the hat turned out. And the best part? I do believe I have enough yarn – qiviut and Loft – to make another.

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