Recycled Yarn Hat

I made my son a scarf when he was in 6th grade.  He had gotten a $20 dollar bill for a birthday present wrapped in one whole skein of red, white, and blue variegated yarn.  He loved the fun of it and the yarn so much he asked if I'd make him a big thick scarf.  I did using 3 more skeins in addition to the birthday skein.  It was just what he asked for long and thick.

Fast forward 6 years and my college boy is cleaning his room and comes out with this scarf.  With "hope this doesn't hurt your feelings" in his eyes he asks if I want the scarf.  I said, "Out grown it?"  He says, "Yes" with "glad you understand" tone to his voice.

My first thought was I'll never use this scarf.  It's too big and too thick.  My next thought was maybe I could recycle this yarn and began to unravel it.  Then I wrapped it into balls using my yarn winder.

Listening to the commentary to the latest "Ice Age" movie I decided to make a hat with one of the skeins.  I was amazed as I knitted this up on my Toyota Bulky KS 650 at how differently the variegated yarn came together.  As a crocheted scarf it was very pretty, but as a machine knitted hat it was down right beautiful!  I decided then I'd knit all 4 skeins up into hats for donation.

This was a little tight on me, but for donation people will have different sized heads and will be just fine.

What I did was on tension 5 I e-wrapped on 70 needles.  I proceeded to knit 40 rows in stockinet.  I rehung the first row so the hat would have a finished edge to fold up.  I like that in a knitted hat.  Then I knitted 60 more rows.  This left plenty of yarn to sew it up into a hat.  Using a tapestry needle I weaved the yarn into each stitch on the machine needles.  Then I moved carriage over the project to remove it from needles.

I pulled the yarn to gather the top.  After doing that I proceeded to do the mattress stitch down the hat toward hem.  Once I got to the hem I continued the mattress stitch down the outside around to the inside until I met where I had rehung the bottom e-wrapped edge.  I then ended the sewing and wove the end in.  Tada hat!