Brinker

Today's featured pattern is Brinker. The hat was inspired by the book Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates, which was published in 1865 by Mary Mapes Dodge. Brinker is the second pattern to show up in Lit Knits.

Much of the story features ice skates. The climax of the book centers in on a skating race, so it seemed especially important to have skating tracks on the hat. And just as the racers go off into the distance, the skate tracks on the hat also become smaller as they go toward the top of the crown. Although it is optional, I liked adding a big, fluffy snowball of a pom pom to the top of the hat.

When I started out designing the hat, I was a little stumped as to what color to make it. Brinker was the 4th design to be knit. At this point, I had to make a decision between choosing mostly neutral colored yarns for the book or to inject some color.

I even went so far as to make three samples. In the end, the blue one seemed like it fit the rest of the book the best. To me, the white edging was like a snow bank and the blue of the hat was like the thick ice covering the river. I imagined skaters jumping off of the snowbank and skating onto the frozen river and the ribbing reflects this thought. The ribbing on the edge of the hat connects to the cables just like the tracks skaters would leave from the snow to the river.

Mum and I drove 3.5 hours one way to get photos with snow in the background. The number of times I have been to the snow is extremely limited, which turned out to be a problem during this particular shoot.
At the end of the shoot, I had this great idea to make it look like it was snowing. I thought I would just throw some snow into the air and everything would look magical. And just to be sure we captured the magic, I set the camera to rapid shoot.

Well, we definitely captured some magic. It just wasn't the magic I was aiming for. I'm not well versed in snow physics, but that day I learned that if you throw chunks of snow into the air, they come back down as chunks of snow.

And that is how I got the picture for the errata page of my website.