It seems to be not only myself and the neighbours downstairs that are wide awake at 0320 am, from my room, the bathroom and the kitchen I can hear some poor demented garden bird (I want to say blackbird from the song but may be totally mistaken) that is singing at the top of its lungs. You know, that birdsong that reminds you of the garden in the middle of the summer? Yeah. Pitch black, cold darkness out there. Well, apart from streetlights and the odd light from a house, I suppose, but it is hardly noon in August out there! Poor thing. Yet another example of how humans and human life disrupts the animal kingdom.
I have an urge to knit an earflap hat using 4ply sock yarn and the double-knitting technique so that it is double thickness. Either that or just a beanie hat as a first attempt. I'd like to knit it top down so that I can decide how long to knit it as I go along and then decide whether to knit earflaps or not.
I can't work out how to start it though. The top/crown of a hat in double-knitting. A double-knit i-cord for a couple of rows then carry on from there? I can feel some experimentation coming on.
Any thoughts/ideas anyone? I can find a top-down earflap hat pattern (one free from Interweave recently) and numerous earflap and beanie hat patterns (in the same free pattern compilation, on Ravelry and else-web).
ETA (edited to add): I have an idea of how to start! Start the two 'layers' of hat separately knitting in the round to make two concave/convex circles and then, once they are both large enough (maybe 30 stitches each or so, starting with 3 or 6 stitches each and increasing 3 or 6 times every other round) I combine them to form the double-knitting, knitting the rest of the hat in the round (until the ear-flaps if I add them).
wide awake
creative