Basically a fun excuse to do a blog post a day, answering the daily questions put on by Eskimimi. Great idea! I’m looking forward to it. I start tomorrow, so keep an eye out!

Fun thing I never mentioned: Ravelry member Alatheia used my Jayne Hat pattern to knit a hat for Wil Wheaton. She gave it to him at PAX East, and took photos of him wearing it with a Doctor Who scarf. I died of geek a little. Good job, Alatheia!

(obviously, credit for the above photo belongs to Alatheia. I wish I was there for it! I’m a total Wil fangirl.)

I’m also happy that I was able to push my progress bar on the Doctor Who Scarf to 10%. I may actually be closer to 15%, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I think it’s going to be the subject of one of my psots this week, which will mean new photos. Stay tuned!

Knitting Jayne hats only takes me about 3 or 4 hours. Closer to 4 in this case, because I frogged back a little while figuring out improvements to the pattern. I think I’ve finally come out with a nice, customizable pattern that is most authentic to the original hat that I’ve been able to achieve thus far. Every hat I have made has been different. The first ones strayed the farthest from the moviehat…

…as per this example, which was one of my first two, given to my two buddies who introduced me to the show. This one was mostly Dryope’s pattern, with a few of my own additions thrown in. The red was too bright, and the colours contrasted a little too much and the hat was overall a little… small. Needed to be a little oversized and not-fitting.

Through the thread I started on Craftster, I found some other Craftsters that had knit their own varieties, particularily Emisanboo, who, since posting on the thread, now gives page 3 of the thread tons of Google hits and sells Jayne hats and kits like a madwoman on her site (go girl!). I tried her pattern for a few of my hats, and while it was a vast improvement over the one I had originally made (oversized, proper sized earflaps), It still wasn’t quite what I wanted. I wanted it to be more movie-ish.

It just so happens that Alafoss Lopi, the shaggy Icelandic wool I use for my Jayne hats, brought out some new warm colours recently, and had just the colours to match the hat(namely, 0065 for the top, 9971 for the base and 9988 for the flaps, though I might experiment with 9964 for the top). Seemed to be the closest I could find in Lopi, which, after a few hats of experimentation, is my favorite yarn to work with for the hats, because after washing it once, it is a lot softer than before.

I had made a good 6 or 7 hats using this colour yarn, altering the pattern a little every time…

and generally liked it. This one is my own, the one I kept for myself.

As I posted yesterday, I picked up some of the new colours to give them a whirl. Knit a new hat over the span of watching two movies.

The colours are much more akin to Jayne’s original hat than my last incarnations…

This specific hat was for a bit of a small head, so I cast on less stitches and the hat is a little small on my head. Most hats, I knit in the size of the previous hat. I very much like the new colours.

Comparison of the old colours and the new:

Slowly getting the hang of this new camera.

More hats will be knit. For now, I focus on sock and baby.

I’ve started working on Jayne hats again. For those who don’t know, the coveted Jayne Cobb Hat is a geek culture hat that was worn by the character Jayne Cobb in an episode of Firefly, “The Message”, after he gets it in a gift from his mother with a poorly written letter about how she knit it to keep him warm in his travels. He wears the hat proudly for the rest of the episode, despite people telling him it looks stupid.

Now, Firefly is one of my favorite cancelled television shows, as it is for many people. This leads to a high demand for folk who can make Jayne hats. I have made (and this is no exaggeration… I just did the count in my head and actually might be missing a hat or two) fourteen Jayne Cobb hats to date.  I started that extra-long and awesome Craftster thread linked above, and got the ball rolling for a ton of Craftsters and others to make their own hats. (I got my pattern from Dryope, however. It was not my own design. Her blog has since vanished, which is a sad thing, but the Craftster thread rages onwards, like the Browncoats.)

Most of the hats had a style similar to this, and all were in these identical colours…

Some were made a little bigger or smaller, but they all looked like this.

Watching the episode, and more importantly, watching the DVD Easter Egg in which Adam Baldwin (who plays Jayne) sings the Jayne song while wearing the hat (hello fanservice), I noticed that, hmm, the orange and the rust red are too dark for the hat.

A screenshot, for example:

The orange on the earflaps, while slightly darker than the bottom of the hat, are not red at all. Just a darker, pinkish orange.

I have some paid requests for Jayne hats. I got new yarn to reflect the more authentic change.

The new colours sitting next to the old colours on my Jayne hat, plus the started hat. I think these colours reflect the authentic ones MUCH better.  These hats are super-quick knits and a lot of fun to make.

Also, the Monkey progresses…

And Boogie progresses even slower.

Don’t even get me started on the babythings. Knitter’s ADD strikes again.