Knitting Today: Sample Beanies

 We have some young knitters in our area.  Helping them with their knitting is a joy.  Before Christmas they started knitting beanies...each casting on a different number of stitches depending on the size of knitting needles they had. They were told to knit in the round on Knit 1, Purl 1 until they had 6 inches or a little more of knitting on their needles.

To prepare for helping them close up the crown I knit two little beanies and followed different instructions for decreasing the stitches on the tops.

These are the two beanies I knit.  You can see there is a vast difference in the size of the hats even though they both started with the same number of stitches: 80 stitches if I remember correctly.  I knit each of them to six inches then began the crown decreases.  The first pattern said to knit the decrease round then knit one round even then on to the next decrease rounds with knit rounds in between,  This turned out to be a very nice little hat.

The other hat decreases came every round with no plain rounds of knitting in between.  This made a much smaller hat.  Still, it is a nice hat and some small head will fit it some day.  It was a good learning experience for me...and thus for the young knitters when they get there.  Being young, they have many things on their plates including school, farm chores, family responsibilities, etc so their knitting is not going as quickly as mine did...

The yarn used on these hats was Patons Classic Wool Worsted.  It is one of my favorite yarns...mostly because it is available locally at Michaels, the only place for 100% wool, which is my preferred yarn.  Lately I have used a lot of Hobby Lobby Yarn Bee acrylic.  Not so nice on my hands but they do have many colors.  I have found ordering yarn online to be somewhat an exercise in disappointment as the colors do not match what the photographs show.  At least not as close a match as I was expecting.  

No. I am not going to start a local yarn store so I can get what I want...