This month in the Knitter's Almanac, Elizabeth talks about hats and borders. "I will come out flat-footed and personally disapprove of crocheted borders on knitted cardigans, but without in anyway trying to convert those who crochet borders expertly and with pleasure. May their paths run smooth." Ahem! Garter stitch -- it should come as no surprise to anyone who has read even a few chapters of any of her books -- is her favorite, worked sideways or straight, to create a simple, flat border for sweaters and cardigans, shawls and blankets.
(She does say, touching on the subject of borders at the neck of a cardigan, "Don't forget to increase at the front neck-corners, and to decrease at the inside corners of a square neck," which I fear that she neglected to point out in the January chapter, regarding the Aran.)
Like Elizabeth, I'm not much of a fan of grosgrain borders, either, which always seems to end up slightly smaller than the knitted part, however sturdy it makes the buttonband.
As for hats this month, she says, "A good summer project is a bevy of hats. They don't take much wool, and are an excellent means of using up leftovers and oddments in the form of stripes or color-patterns." I do have about four balls' worth of the teal-green Cleckheaton left from last month's mittens, and so I will use that.
The mitered or "ganomy" hat -- gnome, to us, with that pronunciation like "gaze-bo" or "sword" with the "w" firmly pronounced, which has stuck with us since childhood -- looks very practical indeed, with the miters coming down over one's ears most warmingly, and the Maltese Fisherman's Hat even more so (with its "ridiculous tassel of a couple of dozen ends ... make still more antic by cutting them at different lengths and putting a knot at the end of each"!) -- but since I am going to make a set with the mittens from last month, which look rather less casual than the Ganomy, I will do the Three-Cornered Hat for this month's Almanac project.