This is SUCH a cute hat!! It’s destined to be a classic. I’ve never had a big slouchy hat before, because they tend to look overwhelming on me…but this one, with its clever and oh-so-simple gathers, is fabulous. It’s an easy knit and great for practicing stranded knitting. Mine is squishy and luxurious with its double thickness of Bugga!

I love that the pattern includes blank charts for creating your own wording for inside the band. Mine reads, “autumn is a second spring,” from the the Camus quote: Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.

I’m still waiting on my leather strap and buttons from Buffalo Wool Co, but I’m very happy with how it looks without them. I’ll take more pics after I put them on.

An even cooler feature is the fact that you can use leftovers to work the contrast squares in a range of colors. I didn’t have a lot of leftovers laying around in Bugga, though, so I did my contrast in all one color. I think it would look especially awesome to use an extremely variegated yarn for the contrast.

Mods:
I knit the larger size but really should have knit the smaller. I forgot about the whole negative ease thing in choosing a hat size, lol. Therefore the hat is rather longer and wider than I need. I solved the problem by running gathers up both sides instead of just the one side--and I love this look very much.

Knit the inside hem in contrast color because I was afraid of running out of main color.

I used Åsa’s winding provisional cast on to start, worked three rows flat, then joined in the round and worked the rest as written. This made it really easy to join the hem, without any sewing or picking up stitches, and the tiny hole is simple to repair when weaving in the ends.

For the lettering, I used this alphabet, but modified it slightly to remove some of the serifs. The tips of most of the ascenders and descenders and the dot on the ‘i’ were applied afterward in duplicate stitch. It’s a nice clear alphabet, made easier to read by a) strong color/value contrast and b) a nice firm gauge.

blocked swatch gauge:
28sts-36rows/4” on US2 needles.
26sts-32rows/4” on US3 needles.