#flat cap

is now finished! (ft. hand-felting process)

This is the Dublin Cap pattern by Cheryl Andrews. Someone in a forum post called it the most complex knitting pattern they've ever encountered. It is indeed very complex and an extremely interesting construction. You'd need to knit the two brims separately using short rows and decreases, put them on stitch holders, knit a narrow lining in the round, attach the brims and then use short rows again to shape the two sides of the cap; then you'd knit back and forth from the top side of the upper brim and as you go combine the top of the cap with the two sides, bind off the few stitches left at the back with a 3-needle bind off to connect with the lining, and finally sew the lining to the inside of the cap.

The reason why I call it my cuck hat is because it's a green hat.

The original pattern doesn't call for hand-felting, but the designer has another pattern of the same cap without the cables that does call for felting. Someone felted the cable version and I really like the effect, so I made sure to use non-superwash yarn and to knit the cap not too tightly so that I could felt it and make it shrink without making it too small for me.

It was my first time doing hand-felting, but I knew that the result of felting can differ a lot depending on the yarn, the time spent, amount of agitation applied and the way it dries. I put the cap in the sink, turned my faucet on at the hottest setting, and added a bit of detergent while the sink filled up. I then put on gloves and rubbed the fabric against itself like I was washing regular clothes:

I would squeeze the water out and try it on every 5 minutes to make sure I didn't over-felt it. (needless to say... my head was wet and smelled like wool by the end of it.) I've seen a hand-felting tutorial say that the knits will stretch a bit first before shrinking, and I find that to be true! The first photo below was taken before felting, and each of the rest of the photos was taken roughly 5 minutes apart. You can see that the felting seemed to speed up after 10 minutes. I ended up not doing the full 5 minutes in the last round, which means I felted the cap for 23 minutes in total.

To control the way the cap dries and get the shape I wanted, I put it on my head again to have an idea of what the shape was, took it off, scrunched up some newspaper into a mushroom shape and put it under the cap to let it dry (spot the kim jong-un):

There’s Treasure Everywhere

Art by rossydoesdrawings on BlueSky