NaNoBlogMo 3 - Jayne Hat

I am a nerd. Dork. Geek. Weirdo. Whovian. Nerdfighter. Whedonite. Whatever you want to call someone who likes quirky things. And I wear these labels proudly. I am still working on my Pippin scarf, and will post an update of how it looks so far later this month (note: I can't work on it much now because I sure as heck ain't doing colorwork knitting in the dark!).

Celebrating my nerd-pride and continuing my NaNoBlogMo digging into the past, I want to tell you about my Jayne hat. I watched the entire series of "Firefly" in about a week in September 2005. I know this because "Serenity", the movie based off the series, was released on September 30th, 2005, and when my friends discovered late in September that year that I had never seen the show, they vowed to have me watch the entire series before we all went to see the movie on opening night. I really can't tell you how many times I have re-watched the show since then, but I can tell you its a lot. So I have seen the episode "The Message", where Jayne receives a knitted hat from his mother many, many times.
Being both a nerd and a knitter, I thought I could probably recreate that mighty fine and cunning hat. If I remember correctly (damn past me for not keeping a hobby blog!) then I first made a Jayne hat for my dear friend, roommate (at the time), and faithful facebook-wife, Claire for her birthday. She was the one that took my Firefly virginity and sat with me for that week of rushed episode watching. Who better to receive a Jayne hat?

I do remember the hat being a lot of firsts for me. It was my first hat knitted in the round (I had tried an odd method of knitting a weird shape and then sewing it up without much success previously), my first hat with a pom-pom and certainly my first hat with earflaps. This was when I was in my "I'll just look at something and figure out how to knit it, screw patterns!" stage, (who am I kidding...I am still in that stage) so I really just winged it. No swatches to test for gauge, no looking at similar patterns for help, just casting on and hoping. I put on the earflaps with a very scientific method of "trying on the hat and putting markers where my ears are and then picking up some stitches and hoping that when I am done knitting that they are big enough and in the right spots and roughly symmetrical".

With a lot of flying by the seat of my pants, I soon had three Jayne hats. One for Claire, one for her boyfriend and one for me.
I really don't wear my Jayne hat as much as I should. I like the idea that it can serve as a beacon to find other Firefly fans.

Looking back, I am surprised that the hats turned out as well as they did considering how little (comparatively) I knew about knitting and how little planning went into them. It also makes me realize that I haven't knit too many hats. Maybe its time to change that.