Lily Design Book No 214 Hat

  This week's hat comes from a pattern book that has no copyright date.  We can narrow down the year a little bit based on the yarn used in it.   The hat pattern uses Lily Rug Yarn, Art 241.   From the few sources I can find online, the yarn was made from 1937 -  early 70s.  Based on the style of the cover photo, I'm going to guess this is late 60s. 

The booklet never tells you what the weight of the rug yarn is but it seems like most rug yarn is either a worsted weight or bulky weight.  This pattern does give a gauge so that should be enough to figure it out.   Of course, I totally ignored that and tried a worsted weight yarn with the suggested I hook as a practice run.  I finished a very small hat and then measured my gauge which was much too small.  None of the other yarn I had gave me the right gauge so I ended up needing to buy yarn for this project. 

We went to Joann's to get yarn. It seemed like the 6 weight yarn would be too big and the 5 weight was to thin. And then Joel found this on and end cap and on sale:

Big Twist Fleck Yarn

Now we can start the pattern. The hat pattern takes up less than three inches on the page and starts out easy working top down to through row 9. Then it tells you to join the contrast color and work the same pattern as on scarf pockets for six rows. Here's where the pattern starts to be questionable. If you work the first 6 rows of the pocket you will end up with the pattern I have on the small hat.  To get the hat pattern you need to start at row 3 of the scarf and switch the colors.  

The flower is a long strip of increases that are kind of scrunched up and sewn together. Once you have the strip done, the directions say, "sew flower as illustrated".

This turns out pretty cute. I think the matching scarf would be cute with the pockets too.

This pattern gets 4 out of 5 stars. If the pattern was less confusing at the end I would have given it 5 stars. The gauge issue was mostly a yarn substitution issue and if I'd used their suggested and discontinued yarn it probably would worked right the first time.

The March patterns are all coming from a 1974 Spring-Summer Good Housekeeping Needlecraft magazine I picked up in a used bookstore in Fergus Falls! I'll show you those and some other fun things from the magazine next week.