FO Post: Salt Creek Hat

Introducing Salt Creek!  A lightly cabled, just-barely slouchy men's hat that's perfect for the coffee-drinking, flannel-wearing guy in your life.  This is my first time writing a pattern, so it may take another month or so before I get a presentable draft ready for publishing, but I'm pretty excited with how it turned out.  I may be putting out a call for test knitters soon as well - stay tuned!

Remember how I had that whole song-and-dance about never knitting hats?

HAH!

As part of the grant I received from Oberlin's Creativity and Leadership Fund, I proposed that I would design paired men's and women's accessory patterns, but focus particularly on the style and wearability of the men's knits.  Although there are some really fabulous designers who offer knits for men, the pool of available designs just isn't as big as the one for women.  Which makes sense, since a large percentage of knitters are women knitting for themselves - I know I am!

But I've also had those times when a male friend asks me for a knit with a particular "feel" to it without necessarily knowing whether that means cables or colorworks, or I want to make something nice-looking (and yet manly) as a gift, and I come up with nothing that quite works.*  I think it would be awesome if knitters both like me and radically different than me had a crapton of stylish men's knits from which to choose from, and if those things were both wearable and interesting to knit.

And to that end, I really hope that Salt Creek fills that desire for others as much as it did for me.

And also: thanks, Lumberjack, for being patient with me in situations such as this.

Me: Let's move you out to the mud, I think there's more light out there.  Now crouch down.
Lumberjack: My knees don't bend that way.
Me: Hang on... oops... okay, you'll be fine.
Lumberjack: Why is there no pizza?


(I did not include the crouchy pictures.  Sometimes I think I'm more of a photographer than I actually am.)

*Also, because it will totally bug me if I don't say something about it: I am grossly, grossly generalizing here.  As a recent Oberlin graduate I desperately want to complicate the shit out of this whole Gendering Knits thing, and how it's sort of silly to label a lace beret as a "Women's Knit" and a cabled one as a "Men's Knit" because hello, that's dumb.  Lace is awesome, and it's only our cultural marking of lace that makes it feminine, not anything about its actual intrinsic properties.  But, since I live within a culture that operates under the assumption of a gender binary, I have to simplify it down to "Knits That Are Culturally Accepted as Masculine" and "Knits That Are Culturally Accepted as Feminine", ergo, Men's Knits and Women's Knits.