Monte Carlo
Make it random, but, like, not TOO random.
Before I start, I should say that the yarn and pattern I’m going to talk about here will likely not be available when you read this. That’s ok, this is not intended as a sales pitch, but it also seems like something I should mention ahead of time.
Hunter has recently reorganized her whole business model and it no longer involves supporting the literal hundreds of patterns she has written over the years. She has discontinued nearly all her old patterns, including this one. And we’ve decided not to dye the yarn when the pattern isn’t available because that feels like an excellent way to disappoint people. Anyhoo. Hunter will occasionally make her older patterns available for a limited time, but that will be the exception, not the rule.
Having said that, if you’re reading this on November 25, 2022, the pattern is on Ravelry and Payhip and the yarn in our shop. Hunter and I will both remove the listings either promptly at midnight on the 25th, or whenever we get to it on the 26th.
About a year ago, Hunter Hammersen and I made a hat together. She came up with the idea, I made the yarn, and she created a pattern. We did’t know each other before this, but had become instagram acquaintances, in the sense that I had bought and knit her patterns over the years and thought she was delightful and then one day she commented on one of my posts and I nearly died.
After I was revived, we emailed back and forth a couple times and she mentioned this idea she had but it would require some very specific dyeing, was I interested? Yep. Yes indeed. Yes, I was interested.
Her idea was fairly straightforward - a brim in a contrasting colour (we will call this colour orange), and the rest of the hat in a pale grey, with the occasional blip of orange that could be knit into a fun little dip stitch. The blips should be sprinkled throughout the hat. Seems simple enough, right?
If we were going to get pickier (we were), then there were a few other requirements. The blip stitches shouldn’t dip down into the brim. There should be more leaves near the bottom of the hat, fewer near the top, and none at all in the crown so that there aren’t blips during the decreases.
Also the blips should be randomly distributed so they have an organic look, rather than accidentally lining up in a diamond or line formation. Or worse, lining up (pooling) in a diamond formation for part of the hat and then your gauge changes and now they clump together and the difference is really noticeable. We want random but not, like, too random.
This is the problem with randomness. If you toss a coin 10 times, about 5 will be heads (H) and 5 will be tails (T). But if you started tossing a coin and got HTHTHTHTHT, you might get suspicious. That doesn’t seem random. Neither does HHHHHTTTT. On the other hand, if you tossed that coin a million times, somewhere in those million flips you would probably get both of those sequences, and suddenly it’s not suspicious anymore, it’s bound to happen eventually, right?
What I’m getting at is that sometimes true randomness doesn’t feel very random if your sample size is small. And a hat with some blips is a small sample, so I wanted to plan the randomness ever so slightly.
We did some basic swatching and mathing to figure out how much orange for the brim (about 20 m, thanks for asking), and about how much yarn per blip (25 cm).
The blip/leaf stitches are created by repeatedly knitting into a stitch 7 or 8 rows below. So to avoid the leaves going into the brim, I added a long section of plain grey after the brim.
For the randomly placed blips, my first try was to place them totally randomly, but then sometimes they would be very close together or all cluster in one area, making for a very unbalanced hat. Instead, I varied the space between the blips, and set goldilocks-esque limits on the shortest and longest distances that could be randomly selected. Not too far, but not too close. And those distances got longer and longer the farther up the hat they went, so that there were more blips near the brim.
Hunter added some instructions in the pattern for what to do if one of the blips falls in a place where you really don’t want it to. She also suggested adding the occasional grey blip if you feel like it, which weirdly became my favourite part.
This hat pattern is a little different than most knitting patterns out there, and the unpredictability is either a delightful feature or a source of frustration, depending on the knitter. For those of us who are able to embrace it, the randomness makes for a fun project that evolves as you knit.
This was so interesting! I had no idea how tricky the dyeing process was.
Once again, a beautiful post. I’m going to go straight over to your store and buy myself a new tuque pattern and yarn pair. Also, your math knowledge really shines when you describe probabilities.