20 Nov 2012: Gave in and put in some elastic around the brim, as the ‘stretchy lace’ clearly isn’t enough to hold it. The result is more of a bell-shape or mob-cap appearance, but it’s more practical.

19 Nov 2012: Much more successful - once I’d worked out that I actually needed 10 decrease points spaced 17 stitches apart (each decrease reduces the spacing by 1 stitch, remember…), and not 17 decrease points 10 stitches apart! And much quicker than working the long peak: I finished it in a few hours. Basically this is just a flat disc to fill in the space between the edge and the crown of my head, and it then stretches out to create a round shape.

Made a Tahiti blossom crochet flower to embellish the plain and rather drab-coloured top, using the last remnants of the bright cream-coloured cotton - just enough left. I hope this won’t make the top too stiff, or too uncomfortable to lie on… which I think the tassel might well have been.

The stitches on this one were so uneven that I thought I really had better try washing and blocking it in the hopes of redistributing some of the ladders - I don’t know what went wrong; I’ve never had such trouble with knitting in the round before, even when knitting lace. A combination of being unused to purling and of thread too thin for the design, I think.

18 Nov 2012: Right. Start again. Calculations:

• I need approx 4.5 inches of hat above the bands to the crown of my head
• This represents 17 repeats of 3-row decrease pattern st this tension, e.g. 17 decreases
• If I increase starting sts by 1 (to 170 sts), then I can work one decrease every 10 stitches and have 1 stitch per needle at the top of the hat

17 Nov 2012: Not at all happy with this. I am running out of cotton and the extra weight of the ‘peak’ is making the loose bottom much saggier. I’m highly tempted to rip it back to the end of the bands and start again with 8 decreases per round instead of 4, in the hopes of getting a round top instead.

15 Nov 2012: Down to 30 stitches per needle (from 42 at the start) - surely it ought to start getting progressively faster to knit sometime soon? At least it’s starting to look a little more like an oatmeal-coloured hat with a bright border now, as opposed to a cream hat with an unpleasant accident at the top!

Definitely too loose now that there’s a bit of extra weight dragging at it up at the peak :-(

13 Nov 2012: Finished the eyelet bands and the buttermilk cream-coloured cotton simultaneously: continuing the peak in an oatmeal grey cotton which isn’t quite as nasty as it looks in the photo…

The hat is about 21” unstretched, which is a bit loose: possibly I should have gone for the 19” option to allow for a firm stretch to hold it on! Maybe I shall need to run some elastic round the lowest band.

12 Nov 2012: Two more rows of eyelets, more unravelling. This pattern seems very prone to ‘losing’ stitches, probably because a dropped stitch is hard to spot on a purl-side-outwards band.

It looks to me as if there is a mistake in the instructions: if followed literally the final row of eyelets will not have 2 knit rows after them but will be followed directly by 5 purl rows. However the photos clearly show that (as one would expect) this eyelet row is identical to the others. I suspect that the repeat should run (purl 6 rows, YO2/ k1, purl into this, knit 2 rows) rather than as currently (knit 2 rows, purl 6 rows, YO2/k1, purl into this).

9 Nov 2012: Had to unravel most of the way back to the beginning of the bands after spotting a ladder down below the start of the eyelet pattern. I should have realised that 169 stitches aren’t supposed to be able to divide neatly into sets of four, and smelt a rat!

6 Nov 2012: Completed bias lace edging and starting on the ‘bands’.

4 Nov 2012: Error in tension - cast on 169 stitches (13 x 13-stitch repeats)

I got 11 stitches to the inch using this cotton thread - clearly much finer than that in the pattern. Had to change up to size 11 needles in place of the size 13s specified, so the fabric will be a bit looser; still acceptable I think. I was tempted to keep the size 13s and simply work the pattern as written (cast on 208 stitches in place of 169), but that would have produced a hat of only 19” in place of the 26” monster, which is going to the other extreme…!