White and Blue Pyramid Hat

Something about cold weather and rain just makes me feel like making these hats! After my last one with the viking design, I still had almost a full skein of white and a bit of blue. I wanted to use them up and so I looked around at more traditional fair isle patterns that were two color.

I came across a few motifs that I liked, one more traditional and the other more modern. I patterned them out on my hat grid and ended up with the results below.

78 stitches wide, traditional (top) and modern (bottom) designs

For some reason I really liked the bottom, and thought it would look really cool fading from blue into white at the top. Parts of it also reminded me of the symbol for earth from Stargate; one of my all time favorite movies, so I've started calling this one the pyramid hat.

I got through the base and the first row of pattern and realized that having only two colors improved the stretch quite a bit. This hat was shaping up to be at least 2 inches too large on my head. I had been using the same 78 stitches around and 6mm hook as before, but I needed to make a change to get this to fit. I scrapped it and started over.

arm for scale

So I went down to a 5.5mm I hook and took it down to 72 stitches. Taking it down in width also meant I had to tweak the design to fit as well.

72 stitches wide design redo

Keeping the smaller size in mind, I made my new foundation row 66 stitches, my second sc around row increased up to 72 (10sc, inc), leading into Row 1 of 72 waistcoat stitches around setting up the new pattern.

I got a few rows in when I got side tracked from this project by the ear warmers for my sister. I was a little worried that the design wouldn't show up right and in reality my stitches tend to be wider than the grid makes it seem. Surprisingly it seemed to be going well as I got through row 11. As usual, I was getting worried about how little blue I had left at this point, but just kept going and hoped for the best as I knew less of it would be needed as I went along.

design rows finished

This design while intricate looking actually has some fairly repetitive row elements that makes it easy to follow, and since the color changes tend to be 5 stitches wide or less, there is no need to worry about carrying colors along until you get up into row 17 or so.

Can't see the seam even through it is right there!

Front side.

After I finished the design rows, it was simply a matter of following the normal close off for these hats, slowly decreasing each row. This time I tried doing an invisible decrease with the waistcoat stitch, but it doesn't work as well as with amigurumi and normal single crochet.

Finished!

Of course these hats really do look best with a pom, so I worked up a white one and added it to the crown. I really like how the design sort of fades out into the clean white top. Even the inside of this hat is pretty cool looking...

Something about the simplicity is just so refreshing. I guess thats part of why fair isle is so popular. It really is the most "knit" looking hat I have made to date. Quite a few people keep telling me to just learn to knit again already. The main factor holding me back from this is time... I know this hat took me about 8 hours to work up and that if I tried to knit it, it would be twice as long easily.

Maybe a new years resolution?

Difficulty: Intermediate
Time to complete: 8 hours