A new look for Kilbride

Why yes, I’ve been ploughing through my mountain of photo editing!

One of the frustrating things about being an indie designer, a one-person business, is that it’s hard to get photographs of different samples on different models. This is the same for all indie designers, yet Hats bring up different concerns to that of, say, garments.

The size range in my patterns is usually wide. Like baby up to large adult kinda range. Not always, but nearly always. Hat sizing has always been a thing of mine since I first started writing patterns - explaining why “one size fits all” is a myth, and encouraging folks to provide more than one size in their patterns and provide accurate head or Hat measurements.

Unfortunately there’s still a fair amount of misunderstanding about sizing for Hats. Just because a Hat is modelled on a child or adult, or vice versa, doesn’t mean it’ll only fit that age range. It’s something we all do, humans are surprisingly visual - if we don’t see the item shown on someone who looks like us we might not think or want to read on and find out more.

When it comes to Hats, there’s a huge overlap in sizes - Aran had a larger head circumference than my mum when he was 18 months old, for instance. One of my most frequent customer service emails has been “will this Hat fit my baby/child/mum?”. Admittedly those queries have slowly become less frequent over the years but it is still something that gets asked a lot, and one way to mitigate that, besides highlighting the size range and linking to my Hat sizing page, is to show the samples on different sized heads of different ages which different hair types, and preferably on different genders. Which is a mighty tall ask of one person!

One Hat that’s flown under the radar is Kilbride. I’ve been wanting to reknit it forever but I’ve needed to wait until my shoulders were up to the task, and be at a point where I could give them a period of rest afterwards, as a beret in sock yarn isn’t something me and my upper mobility issues can pull off so easily!

Eventually I got there, and finally this design has some shots modelled on an adult. What do you think of the new photos? I’ve lost the ball-band for the yarn already and I’m not sure which yarn it is, but I’ll need to hunt it down for the new pattern layout, as that’ll be getting updated too. I’ll let you know the yarn details when I find it!