A Straw Hat for Summer

One of the items on my wardrobe needs list this spring was a straw hat. I had a twill fabric trilby with a tartan band that I'd sewn myself in 2015, and a commercially made ivory knit floppy hat that must be nearly twenty years old, but I also seemed to have a number of summer outfits neither of them worked with, and I wanted to be able to prevent sun damage and (more) wrinkles with some style, not to mention receive fewer scoldings from my dermatologist. 

After scouring the nearby Dufferin Mall and the Stockyards for a suitable straw hat, I bought the classic panama straw you see above at Walmart for $21.47. I thought the PVC leather band and plastic ring trim was ugly, but I could remove it and retrim the hat myself. The problem with inexpensive hats often is the trim, by the way. So many of the hats I saw when shopping for a hat this past spring were a good shape and not bad quality and trimmed in an inexplicably tacky and/or hideous way. If you find an inexpensive or thrift shop hat in a size and shape you like and a trim you don't, keep in mind that you can change the trim pretty easily and inexpensively, but do watch out for the glue that will be left behind. You probably won't be able to replace a wide hat band with a narrower one, or leave it untrimmed, because you'll need to cover up the dried gobs of glue that will be left behind. This is why in traditional millinery hat trims are always sewn in place, making it possible for one to refresh an old hat with new trim without anyone being the wiser. 

When I got the hat home, I did some googling and searches on Pinterest to get ideas on how to retrim a straw panama. According to my research, hey are usually simply trimmed with a band of black or white grosgrain ribbon, with perhaps a flat bow on the side. This was fine by me, as I wanted a simple hat I could wear with everything. On my next trip downtown, I purchased a metre of wide ivory grosgrain for $2. 

 

 

The finished hat. Retrimming a hat is always harder for me than I expect. I have trouble visualizing it, always end up redoing it a few times, am never confident in the results, and even when I declare the job done always feel I haven't gotten it quite right. But I think this one is fairly satisfactory. It's simple and fresh looking, and will go with any of of my summer outfits. Not a bad outcome for $23.47 and the time and effort I put into this relatively easy project. 

Pleasantly Generic and Useful

My grandniece Cauliflower is to turn 15 this summer, and as always, her birthday will be marked by a sweater from yours truly.  

Cauliflower is probably physically full-grown now, and wears a women's size small in sweaters and tops. Surreal as I find it to be the great-aunt of a grandniece just three years away from becoming an adult, it does open up the sweater pattern options, there being far more patterns for women than there are for children or tweens. But I didn't spend long browsing. I decided that since her sweater from last year was a solid colour and a worsted, that this sweater would be patterned and either DK or fingering, I looked through the knitting patterns I have saved to my Pinterest board, and I soon came across the one you see above, which is the Gardengate pattern, designed by Jennifer Steingass. 

For yarn, I purchased 450 grams of Sandnes Garn Sisu in Blue for the main colour, and 100 gram skein of Lang Yarns Super Soxx Silk for the contrast colour. The colours should look good on Cauliflower, who has light brown hair, blue eyes, and fair skin. 

The finished sweater, which I knitted up exactly as specified by the pattern in a size 36. The colours and the pattern are pretty, but I'm not too thrilled with the proportions of this sweater. The yoke is very deep and the sleeves look too long. I just hope it doesn't sit too poorly on Cauliflower. 

I returned two skeins of the blue yarn, and had just 13 grams of the blue and 57 grams of the variegated contrast colour left, for a stash increase of 70 grams. 

As for the little extra trinkets that I like to include when giving one of my grandnieces or grandnephews a piece of homemade clothing, I purchased a little notebook and pen and some hand lotion from Dollarama. I don't know what Cauliflower's tastes are, and at 50 I am probably hopelessly out of touch with what teenaged girls like these days, so I stuck with pleasantly generic and useful.