I love the free Knitty Fish Hat and all of the great modifications people have made. I made many of my own and kept adding notes to my Ravelry projects. So I decided to combine all my modifications in one pattern and post it. Here are a few things I wanted to do with this pattern.

• I wanted the hat to be sized to fit a child (I’ll be posting a modified adult version soon)
• I wanted the beginning of the round to be on the bottom of the fish to hide any color joins (so the lips had to be reworked to accomodate that)
• I wanted my tail and fins to stand out, NOT flop over (with this pattern, you can even add a little stuffing to them if you’d like)
• I wanted my tail to be vertical (like a fish) and not horizontal (like a whale’s)
• I wanted the lips to only turn over as far as I wanted them to, and no further
• I wanted the decreases staggered more toward the tail so that in my lovely sea of stockinette, I didn’t all of the sudden have a decrease round

So - that’s why I wrote out this pattern.

I will warn you, the tail takes a while (short rows done in the round) but it will be a thing of beauty when you get done!

Have fun and please post projects and pictures!

P.S. Thank you to my wonderful sister who helped me test knit and put up with multiple messages amd emails saying things like “no, I think THESE are the right numbers now…”