February 16, 2026

I have broken my yarn ban! C wanted a hat too and I didn’t have any good red in my stash, just super bright. So, I dropped by Island Yarn and picked up some of the good stuff. This hat went much faster than the last one, probably because I was more familiar with the pattern, but also because the yarn is much nicer and not splitty at all.

I did the whole thing (ribbing and body) in the 5.5mm hook. I used my favorite Tulip, which was fine -- the tip was pointy enough with this non-splitty yarn. This time I did a regular slip stitch ribbing like the pattern, not the alternating slip stitch and yarn over slip stitch like the linked video tutorial. The ribbing also went slowly and took many more rows than the pattern indicated, but, like the first, I just picked up exactly 90 stitches when switching to the body of the hat so I could follow the pattern as written.

A slight variation on the ribbing is I didn’t ch1 at the beginning of the row and I did the first and last stitch as a regular slip stitch under both loops. I think it made it slightly neater.

I was also more careful to start the body of the hat on the correct side so that the Vs of the stitches are oriented the correct way when the ribbing is folded up. I know, something only 1 in 100 people would notice about the other one, but it bothered me.