Smoothie hats

For a couple of years now, Innocent smoothies have run a campaign in which they ask knitters to make little hats to go on their smoothie bottles. Around christmas time they then sell drinks with hats on(in some places, but these seem to be quite hard to find). In return, they then give money to Age Concern.
It's a really nice idea, as well as raising money it gets people involved, raises the profile of both knitting and Innocent, and since they encourage people to modify their basic hat design as much as they like, it's a great chance to be creative which they would never be able to match if they just produced the hats themselves on a large scale. I think we at City Knitty have a bit of a soft spot for them too because they gave us a huge number of freebies to get us going for knitting in public day.


So I'm having a play around with some of these. It's nice to be knitting something for charity as well as playing around, and this seems to be a great way to get through the loose ends of wool I have a bad habit of collecting. It's also a great little thing to do in between other projects, particularly for those times when you need something simple to knit but don't want to start any big new project.
My main reason for doing this though(and this is where it gets geeky) comes from a talk I went to recently about Bach, which got me thinking about art generally. There's a whole philosophical ramble behind this(ask me if you're interested), but the upshot is that I'm keen to knit in a more impromptu way, taking little ideas and working them into things, whereas up til now I think I've tended to start with a big idea and go from there. That's a little vague, I know, but the concept is still a little vague for me.

Hugh :o).