...6.10...W.I.P. Wednesday...

...the first athletic sock is finished...I went with the turned down cuff...but I'm still not sure about it...so I may take it out and just do a single cuff...I'll definitely decide before I finish the second sock...

...which will have to wait for a bit...because Our Airman has asked me to make a Jayne Cobb hat...it's from a series that I have neither watched nor even heard of...Firefly...it's an early 2000's space western...a genre that I didn't even know existed...

...and since it's not that often that a grown up son asks his Mom to knit something for him...of course I'm going to get started on it right away...

...so first of all I looked at lots of patterns for the Jayne Cobb hat, and noticed a lot of dissimilarities between the photos that I’ve seen of the actual hat being worn by Jayne Cobb, which are sometimes dark and fuzzy, but I zoomed in on some of the images and counted the stitches...

...and then I went in search of some actual images of the hat...these screenshots are from a video where the actor is singing wearing the hat...and they're a little bit clearer than the screenshots I've got from the actual show...

...the first thing that I noticed was that the colors in most of the patterns are too bright...the colours in the actual film are somewhat muted and the orange section looks like it has flecks of gold in it so I'm going to try to replicate that by adding a strand of fingering weight gold to the bulky orange yarn...and then almost everyone chooses some sort of red for the ear flaps and they look to me more like they are a brownish burgundy, so I want to use the leftover yarn from the unraveled scarf that I made the small burgundy pillow for the sofa out of several months ago as it seems like the perfect colour...

...and then there's the anomaly of the number of rows over the ears...not matching the number of rows over the forehead...so maybe some short rows to accomplish that...most patterns just have a same height band of orange...

...in the end none of the patterns suited me either… the top of the hat looks like it was just knit in a tube and then gathered at the top and secured with no shaping decreases like in a modern toboggan sort of hat...and the gathering area with all those stitches is just hidden with a pom-pom and the ear flaps are not rounded, but it looks like there’s just the natural curl of the stockinette stitch inward and then on the ends, there’s a few decreases which makes the rather pointed ends curl outward...they also may have used some sort of 'stiffener' to create that effect for this 'movie prop'...I think the effect they were going for was that Jayne's Mom was a sort of novice knitter and had knit him this rather odd looking creation out of great love...

...more to come...obvi...

...what's in your workbasket this week?...

~Have a lovely day!