As the fall weather is quickly turning to winter here, my husband got out his favorite gloves and mentioned that he would really like a warm hat to wear with them. Say no more! I had more of this yarn in my stash and enjoyed translating the elements from the gloves into a matching hat.

I measured his head and let out a low growl since it has a 25” circumference which I decided would translate into 24 inches of fabric for snugness at the headband since corrugated ribbing isn’t very stretchy. The glove ribbing was 10sts per inch so I cast on 240sts and began knitting, all the while thinking this was enough stitches for a cardigan!

The most fun part was figuring out the lettering. I inserted his initials and the year as well as ‘Seven Oaks Farm’ which I had abbreviated on the gloves to “7 Oaks” due to lack of space.

In the first rendition, the hat above the ribbing was too wide for the pinwheel pattern and had a drastic reduction of stitches towards the end made it pucker or seem gathered. Ugh. I should have captured a pic of this but I unraveled it all very quickly and reconsidered the stitch reduction and shape of the crown. I think I came up with a better solution in the end but with so many stitches per inch, this hat didn’t follow any ‘formulas’ that I had knitted before.

Challenges: decreasing in both Pinwheel and Salt and Pepper patterns and doing so ‘in color’.

Solutions: For Pinwheel, I built in additional stitches in the multiple so that I could take them away later without much notice to the pattern changing. This was relatively easy.

Decreasing in color for Salt and Pepper (S&P) took a bit more reflection. My goal was to keep the EOR decreases on the crown of the hat (on either side of a double solid stitch line) as disguised as possible. S&P pattern using left and right decreases in color pattern is a bit tricky. I so often use right and left color decreases (as well as increases) when patterning in a color “line” (as seen in the sole here and here that I had to re-think my color decreases for S&P.

Thank goodness, 240 sts ultimately reduced to 4 sts for an icord “hook loop” which allows the wearer to hang up the hat to let it dry after wearing in winter precip conditions. He is pleased and altho this is not a surprise, I have knocked off one knitted XMAS gift which is ready to wrap!

One last thought about this yarn: I like it a lot despite the color limitations. It comes up on Ravelry as a “lace weight” but it is really just fingering weight with an extra twist.