Ah, yes. The knitwear that started it all. I was looking online, without success, for a pattern for Compo's hat. I eventually gave up and created my own with the assistance of the pause button on the DVD remote control. Before that, however, I was relying on Google. It led me to an unreliable pattern that caused me to foam at the mouth and rant incoherently on instant messenger to knitting-illiterate friends. I even changed my Facebook status to "Good God idiot knitters piss me off. If you must post the WRONG pattern to a hat from a TV show, you should at the very least format the pattern properly. If Lee Ermey knitted, he'd be saying that this is the knitting equivalent to fucking a person in the ass and not even having the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach around." I was somewhat mollified when my friend Steve observed, "That may be the singularly most harsh review of anything related to knitting I've ever seen. Nice." I thanked him and then got to work making my own pattern.
The very next day, with my fresh pattern, I went back to the bad pattern I'd seen the day before. I thought of a few other patterns I'd seen on the Internet that really should never have been posted. Then I remembered a few knitting disasters of my own that I at least had the decency (or, perhaps more accurately, shame) to destroy before sharing them with the world. Realizing that the bad hat belonged in that category, I told my friend Brian, "I think I want to start a subsection of the knitting section of my website devoted to bad knitting. Like bad astronomy but with yarn." "Do it," he said, and thusly this section was born.
And the bad Compo hat became the very first page.
This is a screenshot of the blog I found. Yes, this seemingly charming crimson cap is what started it all.
The first thing I noticed about that blog post was the worthless opening paragraph and questionable punctuation. This is about bad knitting, not bad writing, though, so I'll say instead that the first thing I noticed about that blog post was the inaccuracy in the description of Compo's hats. The author describes Compo as wearing one hat for several years and then switching permanently to the sage green cabled hat. Compo in fact wore at least two other hats in the in between periods. No matter.
In the next paragraph, the author describes the fit of the hat and the needles used to make it. The hat turned out too small, and she had to frog the whole thing upon completion. What the hell, people; this is what test swatches, knitting gauges, tape measures, and calculators are all for. Since I learned how to incorporate those tools into knitting, I've never had a problem with a garment not fitting. Also, why would you finish it and then frog it? This is why you try things on and measure them every so often as you go.
Incidentally, I'd be willing to bet that at least part of the problem of the hat being too small could have been alleviated if she had used the correct number of stitches. This is what shortchanging your ribbing will do. The ribbing in between the cable twists of Compo's hat is P2K2P2K2P2, and she knitted P1K2P1K2P1. With a loss of 3 stitches per repeat, she lost a total of 24 stitches, meaning she was working on 88 stitches instead of 112. That's a net loss of at least a couple of inches. I wanted to check her gauge, but, unsurprisingly, she hadn't posted it. As I said above, this is what gauges are for. How many times have you seen "to save time, take time to check your gauge" at the top of a knitting pattern?
At this point I glanced under the picture of the hat and saw the formidable phrase "Pattern: None." No shit.
Also, there is the problem of the wrong needle size for the yarn weight. She used size 7s, which she knew were too small for that yarn. Rather than simply purchasing the correct size, 8 (I cannot fathom not owning size 8 needles), she used the incorrect size anyway and then actually asked "Why didn't I just get new needles?" *Facepalm*
Another *facepalm* incident occurred when I noticed that the author describes this as a right twist cable when you can tell by looking that it is a left twist cable. What the hell kind of idiot can't tell the difference between left and right? God that worries me.
There is also the problem of the color. I do like the shade of red she used, but it is nevertheless inauthentic. Compo's hats were all green. One was deep forest green; the others were all the same shade of sage. Probably not all Last of the Summer Wine fans are as obsessed with meticulous accuracy as I am, but I'd think that if you want a Compo hat, surely you'd want it to look like Compo's hat.
Finally, I saw that the author admitted that this was the first thing she'd ever attempted to knit off TV. You don't say. Okay, here's some advice, Bad Compo Hat Knitter: Don't post botched first attempts. Hell, don't even admit to them. Why couldn't the hat you posted have been a trial run before making another, better hat (as you said you would) and posting THAT one instead? Yes, honey, you need to make a few more things off TV before posting them on the Internet. And for God's sake learn the art of perfectionism. It prevents libel traps for vicious people like me who should never have been taught how to code.
Having said that, I have seen far worse knitting. The pattern is crap, but the hat, while I know exactly what is wrong with it, is a lovely color; I'll give it that. The gauge looks consistent, and despite the lack of a proper pattern, the cables and ribbing decreases (though wrong) look evenly spaced. Even though the yarn is too thick for those needles, it is not a bad hat. It is, however, a bad Compo hat.