Meghan’s mother asked me to make this for her.

I soaked the red yarn before using it, after a bad experience with a different red yarn and a red/pink Santa hat. I still see a little bit of red at the edges of the cream in places.

• 3.75 mm needles for rib. Long-tail cast on.
• 8 rows rib
• switch to 4 mm needles. 7 rows then start chart. Somehow I ended up with 2 extra stitches (98 vs. 96) so I added another stitch to the start of each chart to the tree trunk, so 99 for the pattern.
• I used the invisible float technique from this pattern but next time I may just add snowflakes to the top part, as my floats are pulling. I expect blocking will help this.
• on the last row of the chart I knit the 2 tree trunk stitches together.
• did a spiral decrease after 2 plain rows from Basic Norwegian Star Hat. I wanted the decreases to be in the areas between the deer and trees, so knit 7 then k2tog, then knit 14 k2tog. I’ll have to think about doing the decreases next time as k14 k2tog, depending on how this looks.

Next time I think I’ll add the stars/snowflakes instead of the invisible floats

Frogged the first version using Chunky. I was away, and the LYS didn’t have worsted in red and cream, so I tried to adapt with Chunky. 2nd try got the width correct (2 repeats, adding 5 stitches - 2 on either side of the deer and one to the trunk of the tree) but the height wouldn’t have worked.

Re-starting with Cascade 220. Much better yarn.

• weights 91 grams including the 3.5 inch pompom.

• 46 cream and 69 grams red left over.