A Trio of Hats

It's always nice when projects start going by quickly.
I completed my hat for Brother-in-Law J:

I think it turned out well.

It's Antler Toque by tincanknits. I made one ages ago for J, but it was too small so I appropriated it and have been wearing it ever since. This was delivered to J about a week ago, and he likes it! Always a plus; he was going to have to keep it regardless. 

I started the gray and blue bow hat for Cute Baby:

It's loosely based on Bow Baby Hat by Cassandra May, tweaked for size. 

Without bow.

With bow, as it was meant to be.

Since it was too big, I briefly played around with the idea of putting in a few seams to slim it down, but no dice. So I turned it up and stitched it down some:

Oy.

It fits now, sort of, but doesn't look great. Cute Baby might just have to wait for this one. Grow, little baby, grow!
As we have discussed before, this is to avoid everyone getting frazzled by assuming she's a boy in the little blue/white/gray onesies that we insist on putting her in regardless of social gender norms. I also caved and cast on for another hat in the teal and orange colorway:

In my defense, I needed something mindless to knit while on the road doing errands. J's hat was not complicated, but more so than I wanted to drag around with me daily, and the bow hat had reached the decrease stage and so needed an extra needle I couldn't immediately find.
However...I don't like it. I put the pompom that came with the Caron Cupcake kit anyway, but the self-striping yarn just DOES.NOT.WORK with this size hat. I like the turquoise, I like the orange and yellow-ish contrast, but gosh darn it when the stripes end up being in the exact center of the hat, I just don't think it looks right. Sigh...
I also decided to dress up the first orange-only hat as well so it would be more useful. They both are well made and a good size for Cute Baby right now, but the orange one has the above-mentioned gendered problem and is just a little too plain. My Friend K had crocheted Cute Baby a beautiful hat with one of the overlarge flowers that are so popular in baby wear right now. I don't crochet, and the one learn-to-crochet magazine I have made flowers seem a little intimidating for a project that I wanted done and done now. To Ravelry we went to find a knit version of the oversized flower.
I found the easily named Flower Scarf by Robyn Diliberto. Her method seemed simple enough: start with 9 stitches, increase 2 stitches to every stitch 3 times, to 27 to 81 to 263 stitches in 8 rows. Yikes. I thought it funny that the designer felt the need to defend her method right away in the Ravelry posting; stating she didn't see what everyone was complaining about in terms of the difficulty of this method. She said she "used longer dpn’s and it was not that difficult. If you are having a hard time be a creative knitter - try working the flower on two circular needles or magic loop." She also recommended working it flat and seaming it up, but I dislike sewing and prefer minimal fuss with finishing up so I went with circular needles. 
I bring this up only because, despite Robyn's disbelief, increasing stitches as quickly as this is in fact difficult to manage. 

Can you feel the tension in the stitches?

Things quickly got out of hand as the number of stitches exploded. I know I knit tight tension, but by the row of 81 stitches it became very difficult to knit without dropping stitches. So I increased the number of needles to help spread out the surface area.

This is version #2 with 5 needles total.

Even this was difficult to handle as the flower exploded towards 263 stitches. It quickly became ridiculous. 

Yeah, that's right.

I did actually work that. I can't say it was the most fun and I could definitely feel it in my wrists and finger pads after it was done. 

I'm not sure if I'm happy or sad to say...

Awww...

It looks super cute! I really like the effect. It's nice and 3D, the turquoise color pops with the orange and mustard well, and it makes it a little more 'girly'. I'm happy with the outcome, but I will officially disagree with Robyn. You're wrong, friendly designer Robyn. Your design is, in fact, a pain to work with. My evidence to that opinion:

Yeah.

These are all the needles I needed to make the flower accent without hurting myself, without dropping stitches every 2 seconds, and not making me hate my life. 

A little more organized.

No pattern/piece that takes 4 double pointed needles and 5 circular needles to complete could be considered "easy" and "not a pain to work". The jury is still out on whether or not it was worth it. 

At least now I know I have 4 sets of #6 circular needles for some reason.