My first Jayne hat!

Okay, so officially (at 1:15 a.m. EST) it’s Halloween. I am going as Jayne Cobb this year, as some of you may have already seen in my previous post “Jayne Cobb cosplay ideas”. One of the things I talked about was the famous knit hat that Jayne receives from his dear mother (known in the fandom ‘Verse as Ma Cobb, the suspected meaning of “MA” in Jayne’s tattoo being “Ma”). I was able to order one of my Blue Sun Better in Red t-shirts from my Spreadshirt store, I have cargo pants and SWAT style boots and my teenage son is letting me borrow is air soft rifle and air soft handgun. I also acquired from the costume shop a fake cigar and a leather wrist strap with (fake) bullets on it. They didn’t have a plain strap and I figured one donned in bullets would be suitable for Jayne.

All that alone would be enough for any Browncoat to recognize me. In fact, when my shirt came in, I wore it to the mall and the guy working Sbarro’s in the Food Court instantly recognized me and we started chatting up the show and movie! However, I still was feeling an empty space. The hat. The beloved knit hat was missing. I had no money or even time to order one at this point so I got orange and yellow yarn (to go with the various shades of red I had to choose from here at home) and whipped out a Jayne hat using my Knifty Knitter green round loom. I am not a skilled knitter but I do pretty well and move pretty fast using the hand held looms.

I did a quick search to see if there was a pattern already online for doing a Jayne hat on a hand held loom but didn’t really see anything. So I wrote down what I did as I did it. Please know that this is NOT perfect! It’s fine as a hat but as a replica it isn’t perfect. It is, however, enough for any Browncoat to know. Things I might do differently next time doing this on a loom is to make the yellow part shorter, maybe the orange longer… maybe… Also I did not have the right shade of red for the ear flaps and stuck with the darker of the shades I had on hand, so next time, I’ll likely get a more rust color of red and more rustic yellow as this yellow is quite bright. I LOVE the shade of orange I got.

Okay, with that said, here is what I did to create my Jayne hat using a handheld loom:

Materials:

Green round Knifty Knitter loom and hook
Crochet needle/yarn needle
Scissors
Cardboard (for making the pompom)

Yarn:
orange:  Red Heart Super Saver, worsted (4 ply), Carrot (art. E300, color: 0256)
yellow:  Red Heart Super Saver, worsted (4 ply), Brt. Yellow (art. E300, color: 0324)
red:  Red Heart Super Saver, worsted (4 ply), Burgundy (art. E300, color: 0376)

***Use two strands as typically done with these looms.***

1.  Knit 10 rows of orange and make brim.
2.  Knit 12 more rows.
3.  Tie on yellow and knit 20 rows (might not do as many next time, this makes for a very tall hat)
4.  Knit/sew/crochet off and close and tie top of hat.
5.  Mark place for front of ear flap, close to temple and put that on the first peg of the loom. 6.  Put on total of 10 pegs (see picture below) and loom knit 18 rows.

Starting the ear flaps

7.  Decrease on each side of the ear flap for every new row after the first 18 rows until the hat is only on two pegs.
8.  Knit and tie off. Leave a few inches of your strands hanging rather haphazardly. Repeat steps for second ear flap.
9.  Use the cardboard method to create the pompom (see Instructional Video below). I used two strands of the red and one each of the yellow and orange, so that there would be more red than yellow and orange.

10.  Tie the pompom to the hat and….
….enjoy!

My very first completed Jayne hat!

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