This Pattern is Retired…but you can (probably) get it in November

I have a lot of patterns! But I also get overwhelmed if I have to deal with them all at once. So I’ve picked 12 of my favorites (the Core Collection) to keep around. Then every few months, I decide on a theme or a technique and make a handful of related patterns (the Rotating Collection) available for a little while (then they go away again).

The other patterns are retired and are not generally available. However, because I know some folks will want them, I make many of the retired patterns available for a few weeks every November. If you want me to tell you when they’re back, subscribe to the mailing list or patreon, and I’ll let you know!

• If you see the buy buttons on this page, you’ve caught it on one of the days it’s available!
• If you don’t see the buy buttons on this page, it’s not currently available.
• If you want to hear when the retired patterns are available (most likely in November), subscribe to the mailing list or patreon, or keep an eye on my instagram.

This is a companion to Collusion and Entrapment (the blue and purple hats in the pictures at the bottom of this page).

So I love seeing everyone else’s beautiful, intricate, multi-color masterpieces. I do. But if I’m being totally honest, the idea of making my own scares me. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of proper colorwork. And if we’re being super honest, I feel a little scared combining colors, too.

But this? This I can do (and if I can do it, you can too).

All you need is a nice, quiet, respectable background yarn and a slightly flashier contrast yarn. Then you just sit back and let the stitch pattern do all the work.

It’s easy (you’re only dealing with one yarn on any given row), it’s fun (I may possibly have found myself saying boop boop boop every time I made one of the nubblies), and it looks awfully cute when you’re done. And, if you happened to use a more variegated yarn for your contrast yarn? Well then it will look even more like you were doing fancy (cough, intimidating) things with colors!

The hat is written in five sizes (castons of 96, 100, 104, 108, and 112 stitches), and you should feel free to adjust your gauge a bit to fine tune the fit of the hat. Just be sure that you’re working at a gauge that gives you a fabric you like with your chosen yarn (you want something dense enough that you don’t see the contrasting yarn behind your fabric).

I recommend working at something around 4.5, 5, 5.5, or 6 stitches per inch, and I’ve included a table to help you figure out what gauge you’ll want to use for your size. With that range of sizes and gauges, the hat will fit a head between 17.5 and 25.5 inches (with lots of points in between).

Oh, and just to help you plan, I used about 150 yards of the gray and 100 yards of the pink yarn to make a hat for a large adult. If you’re making a bigger or taller hat (or if you use a skinnier yarn), you might want more like 200 yards of the main color and 125 yards of the contrast yarn.