This hat is a refinement of my first foray into three-color double-knitting, or triple-knitting for short. I stumbled across the pattern on Jessica Tromp’s website and created this pattern. I got many comments on it when Twist Collective put it atop my article on double-knitting in their Winter 2009 issue, but I didn’t have a pattern at the time and didn’t expect I’d be able to publish one anyway, since the chart was not originally mine. However, honesty is the best policy, and I emailed Jessica to ask if it was okay if I used this pattern in my book — and to my surprise, she agreed! The first hat I designed with it used an 8-sided decrease and spiraled up to a point — but I never liked the point, so I worked out a more complex and elegant closure, charted here.

Struktur is a German word, which Google translates to, among other things, “structure, texture, fabric, construction, weave”. Considering that it also looks like a set of skeletal building blocks, I couldn’t have asked for a better name for the pattern.