I realized over Christmas that I had equipped most of my immediate family with woolen scarves and gloves, but not myself or my husband. I realized around New Year’s that my yarn stash had accumulated things I wanted converted to useful items that would be stored elsewhere. So I am making myself a hat.

Pattern: This is a perfectly adequate pattern, but it assumes you know the basics of how to make a hat. For instance, instructions to join your cast-on in the round to start to knitting are not present. The charts are quite nice, if perhaps a bit small as originally formatted. As many others have noted, the directions for how to do the different twisted decreases are a bit unclear, so here is my translation:

“knit 2 together twisted” = knit 2 together through back loops
“knit 1, twist next stitch and pull over” = knit one stitch, slip next stitch as if to knit from the back (so insert the right needle into the stitch with the two needles parallel from the back of the fabric), return both stitches to the left-hand needle (transferring as if to purl) and pull left-most stitch (the twisted one) over the right-most stitch. Slip remaining stitch to right needle.
“knit 3 together twisted” = knit 3 together through back loops
centered double decrease = slip 1 from behind to twist, then return this stitch to the left-hand needle. Slip two as if to knit together, then knit the next stitch through the back loop. Pass slipped stitches over. This twists the edge stitches and not the center stitches of the decrease; I thought it made the most sense visually to finish the diamonds. When decreasing three columns of twisted stitches, I twisted each of the first two stitches before returning them to the left needle and proceeding as described above; this continues the column of twisted stitches through the decrease.

I make no claims that the above match what the original designer did; I just picked these methods so that every decrease had the same amount and direction of twist in the top stitch as that of a ktbl (namely, one half-turn clockwise if viewing the stitch from above) without being too tight to knit into.

Yarn: I haven’t had much experience with bamboo before, but this yarn feels like a slightly splitty wool to me. It does grow a bit on blocking. That being said, I am not sure it was ideal for this pattern. With all the twisted stitches and lace, I suspect this pattern would work best with a high-twist, non-fuzzy yarn that would show off the pattern detail with minimal blocking.

Of course, the fuzziness hides uneven stitches. That’s nice.

Execution: I started with a twisted German cast-on, joined in the round, and started purling. It occurred to me that since you work in garter stitch for the first three rows, one could work the three initial rows flat and then join in the round, thus reducing the likelihood of twisting the initial join and removing the need to purl those first rows. I didn’t, but only because I didn’t want to deal with neatly sewing up the little seam at the end. The hat was started with magic loop, which converted to traveling loop as the hat’s circumference increased and the two loops needed for magic loop bugged me more and more.