Ta-dah!

   Another lace project, what a surprise!!  I just can't get enough of this lace, it is so addicting!  This one's not a shawl, it's a sun hat for my niece's upcoming summer, cottage  wedding!  She plans to marry in the sunshine and I thought I would carry my shade around with me.
The hat's from the book "A gathering of lace" gathered by Meg Swansen.  Another reason for the hat, my niece's fiance is from UK and his family is from England so I was thinking I would wear this hat in their honour.  Crazy eh?
The pattern knit up fairly easy and quickly.  My handspun is 23 wpi.  Pattern called for crochet cotton or fine linen so my yarn was a bit thicker than called for so I used size 2.5 mm needles.  Pattern wanted size 3.25.  I found using this tighter knitting gauge kept the hat together more when blocking, and wow did I block!

Progress so far!!

 I was worried while I was knitting, wondering what sort of hat block I would use.  But, I found  a plastic pretzel container that I had saved for some reason, I guess this is the reason.  My dh used a dremel tool and cut the top off the container @ 3" in height and the circumfrence of the container was 22", just my headsize.

I used other ravelry's advice and mixed a concoction of distilled water, cornstarch and fabric stiffener.  Plunked the wet knitted hat into the container, squeezed out the excess, saved the excess for spraying on later after blocking, took the whole thing to the blocking board and blocked it out to circumfrence of 36".
It took a few days to dry completely but to my surprise it was stiff, really stiff.  I added a white bow, later I may change this to black as my wedding outfit is black and white.  And ta-dah here is my finished hat......