Pixie

As much as I love Eliza's Cubba Hat, it seems to be getting a bit small. And I liked that she had a blue/purple hat and a pink/orange hat, so one or the other matched any given outfit. So I flipped through my Vintage Baby Knits book (because I want to knit just about everything in that book) last week and cast on for the Stella Pixie Hat.

What a great little knit! Looking at it, I expected it to be shaped with decreases or short rows, but it's not. When you knit it up, it looks like this:


The "ribbing" on the top isn't really ribbing at all, it's purl welts. Because if you knit vertical rows of knits and purls, the purls recede, but if you knit horizontal rows of knits and purls, the knits recede. And these horizontal rows of knits and purls pull in, just like ribbing, only in the other direction. So you knit this rectangle with no shaping at all, just taking advantage of the nature of knits and purls, and then you fold it in half and graft the top. Voila! Hat. I am such a sucker for clever patterns.

Except when I folded mine in half, I didn't have the same number of stitches on each side. It's always something with me, isn't it? So I went looking and found my problem:

An error in the stitch pattern. Lesson: don't knit this pattern in semi-darkness.

What to do? That blip threw off the pattern for the whole left side of the hat. Should I rip? Of course not. I pulled it off the needles and dropped a whole section of stitches. I probably didn't have to drop even as many as I did, but I figured it would be more of a pain to keep track of exactly which stitches I had to drop how far, so I just pulled the needles out and started pulling.


Yet another reason to love double pointed needles.


Coming right along.


Oops, missed one.


Almost done. (And the munchkin woke up.)


Where I should have been an hour ago.


Grafting.


And, hat!

Now let's try it on.

Heh.

Side view:

See what I mean about the purl welts?

She didn't need the added height of a button band to fasten it, so I crocheted a quick chain and wove it through the cast on edge for a tie. I had some tension issues from the surgery, but a quick bath and run through the dryer (yarn is Cherry Tree Hill Supersock, so no worries about felting), it's mostly evened out.