Nerd Knits: Legend of Zelda Triforce Skull Cap

Decided to try my hand at knitting a hat for my friend's birthday, but it's only the third hat I've ever made. The first two ventures were well-intentioned, but not exactly something you would want to wear or buy. So, with a bad track record under my belt, and not just a bit of trepidation threatening to wilt my resolve, I took to my circular needles.

Knitting is the art of patience, because one project can literally take 15 hours of your life. Luckily, the pattern was easy enough that I could watch a movie, or listen to lectures while knitting. I watched a couple of solid state chemistry lectures from the MIT Open CourseWare website. If you get a chance, look through some of their lectures. It's free education, people :p So yeah, some chemistry to while away the hours of yesterday, and then today, a little bit of Shakespeare, specifically, Julie Taymor's adaptation of The Tempest. It was my first viewing of The Tempest ever, but I thoroughly enjoyed it :D

I started two days ago but had to unravel the first iteration because it was too short. The second attempt began yesterday, and I finished about half in three hours. The next half was finished by lunch today.

Closing the skull cap was a little difficult because hat patterns usually call for the use of double-pointed needles (DPNs)...I don't have these needles in my possession @~@ I improvised by using three other sets of circular needles that were about the same size. It was a little difficult, but I found that if you can close most of it off, any holed areas can easily be hidden when you weave the ends into the crown of the skull cap. Here's the finished cap without the triforce pattern:

I used duplicate stitching to add the triforce pattern to the hat. Duplicate stitching took a long time to do, but I think it's because I kept taking stitches out after inserting the yarn through the wrong rows @~@

If anyone's interested, I used Berroco's Voyage super fine alpaca yarn, colour 4016, and used 6mm circular needles. I also didn't follow the pattern exactly. I added more than 25 rounds of stockinette stitch because it was too short for an adult. I probably did about 50 rounds :p

In any case, this turned out a lot better than I thought it would. Yahoo!