First Hat
Cast on this hat for my sister on 6/19/2015. Good road trip knitting for my trip to the Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene, OR.

I love how this hat looks and love cables … but I find knitting them a little tedious. I just really prefer projects that I can be pretty mindless about. That said, this goes pretty quickly.

7/17/2015 - Coming in the home stretch, more than halfway through the decreases, everything on DPNs now … and I see I’ve mis-crossed a background stitch. I’ve got an extra in one repeat, and one two few in the neighboring repeat. I try to rip back a few rows and the stitches just pop out everywhere. Aargh! I’ve got everything back on the needles, but I’m going to need to tink 2-4 rows back so I can be sure everything is lined up again. Sigh. I should have just tinked to begin with! Project on hold until I have some time where I can concentrate on this.

Tinked back two rows and then finished the hat on 7/26/2015. I think it’s a little short, so I’ll have to see if my sister likes it, or if I should make another one to fit her better.

Verdict: Too short for my sister, but it fits her daughter. I’ll knit another for my sister and add a pom-pom to this one to keep them easy to tell apart.

A wee bit of i-cord added to the top of the hat instead of a pom-pom (12/22/2015).

51 g of yarn, 126 yards.

Second Hat
Cast on 11/26/2015 and working on the hat for my sister now. I need to add about two inches in length to it. In the first hat I knit, 8 rows in the cable pattern is about 1 inch in length. To add two inches to the hat, I’m going to 1) knit 1.5 inches of ribbing, 2) knit chart B instead of A, and 3) knit rows 1-8 of chart C twice through.

12/3/2015: Gah, now that I’m ready to start the second set of rows 1-8 I see that the braided cable repeats every 8 rows and the twining cable repeats every 10, so I can’t just add 8 rows and still have things line up. Even worse, perhaps, is that I re-measured before I started knitting the cable rows, and realized I only need to add 1.5 inches to the hat, so I knit chart A instead of chart B like I had planned. I have to rip back to the ribbing and restart all the cabling.

New plan to add 1.5 inches to this hat, as compared to my first version: 1) knit 2 inches of ribbing, and 2) knit chart B instead of chart A.

12/13/2015: Had a friend over for dinner and so had time I could focus on charts while chatting. Made good progress - finished the 2” of ribbing, knit chart B, knit the first 8 rows of chart C.

Gah! I found that I had marked several Habitat projects as helpful because they gave clues on how to make the hat longer. Too bad I didn’t realize that before I ripped back to the ribbing, sigh.

12/22/2015: Finished! And it’s a little bit too big, but it will work because I’m not knitting it again.

61 g of yarn, 150 yards