A Monmouth Cap

I have reached a pretty decent stopping point for the felting of a Monmouth cap I knit a few months ago.

I used Colleen Humphrey's pattern on Ravelry, which she says was done stitch-by-stitch from the extant Monmouth cap that is (or was) in the Nelson on Museum & Local History Centre (now known as the Monmouth Museum) in the UK.  Here's a link to the pattern (it's a free pdf download): https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/monmouth-cap-the-details-matter

Here is what the hat looked like fresh off the needles.

      

I used some Cascade 220 remnants, probably a bit more than one 100-gram skein.  It is knit 2-stranded, in the round, on whatever random big needle one has lying around.  Then it is felted down to size.  I used the washer/dryer rather than felting by hand, because I am lazy.

The first few rounds of felting were a bit unsatisfactory -- the felting was uneven, with some areas felting well and others almost completely unfelted.  But today I ran it through one more load of laundry, washer and dryer, and it felted sufficiently well.  I'll let it be and think about whether it would benefit from anything else.

I'd like to have a knitted hat that is relatively windproof as well as warm, and also somewhat water-resistant.  We'll see if this one works.

Warm, water-resistant, and wind-proof are my goals for things like hats.  I've knit a few that come pretty close.  We'll see if this one joins that rare club.  These days, I rarely take 6am walks when it's 0F and blizzarding.  So the warmth requirements aren't quite so hardcore.  Even so, wind is probably the biggest enemy of warmth.  I'm hoping this felted hat will be up to the task.

The hat fits slightly loosely around my temple (though it feels a bit snug going on, probably because there's not much elasticity left in the cast-on).  It does have a bit of a slouchy top, the air space that the hat is supposed to have.  Most sources claim that the hat is supposed to be worn above the ears.  I like to pull them down over my ears so that my ears stay warm.

It was fun to knit.  I've already knit one as a gift.  The previous one felted without any weirdnesses, though I didn't try to felt it down quite as much.  This one is for me.  I might well keep knitting them, just because.

The Monmouth Cap is a style of knitted hat that was popular in the UK between the 15th and 18th century, and is similar to a lot of European hats of that time period.

Someday I'll write about other warm hats I've knit in addition to the everyday hats that don't need to be quite as warm.  I have to go back through what I posted way back when to see if I already talked about them.

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I'm almost done with a <80-round doily that is a mini-KAL with someone else.  The pattern has some things that the other person found puzzling.  We got that figured out.  Then the other person decided that the photo didn't match the chart, and came up with a variant that looks a lot more like the photo.  Given the vagaries of charting, both variants are perfectly reasonable interpretations of the chart symbols.

The other person is done.  I will wait until pics have been posted before I write much more.  I am the follower rather than the leader of this KAL and it only seems right to let the other person post about the project before I do.

Is that sufficiently cryptic?

Anyway, I am looking forward to being done with this little doily so I can return to Lavori 7/30.