Diving into design

I've been an avid ravelry user for a long time and among the many things I've discovered is how wonderful malabrigo yarn is, sooooo soft against the skin. So I joined the Malabrigo Junkies group on the ravelry forums.

In October 2012 the Mal Junkies ran a Stockpile Designer Challenge, for designs made in one skein of one of the highly varigated colourways in any of the Malabrigo bases. And this finally stopped me procrastinating and have a go at designing. Luckily there were some highly varigated skeins in my stash (however did that happen) and I start on the idea of a hat, even though I haven't made many hats.

The puzzle of how to stop the short colour repeats pooling was soon solved by the notion that short rows should be incorporated, then I moved onto how do you arrange short rows around a head?

So I started to fiddle with the idea of going around the head and having the end of the row as the top of the crown. Except that when I started actually knitting it showed me that the edge with fewer rows was shorter but it wasn't very short, it would need gathering in to become a crown point. Hmmmm

And then I remembered one of the hats I'd made previously, to the Hannah pattern from Blake Erlich (free on raverly), which is a hat with an opening for your ponytail. I made mine in the bright purple Jacinto Malabrigo Chunky

and it turned out really well

So now I was thinking that I'd make it a ponytail hat and the short side would fit around my highish ponytail.

So after some fiddling about and a first version that only partly worked, I had this one

As part of the competition we could call for test knitters from the group and I am so grateful for their efforts and suggestions etc. Really felt like I could so this once I saw them actually wearing their hats made from my pattern. To keep with the pony theme and make it Australian I called it Brumby Jill (a Brumby is the Australian equivalent of Mustang, a wild horse).