This little hat was made in two stages……I used a purl side I-Cord cast on then did blackberry stitch for several inches before doing a purl side I-Cord cast off using a red ribbon yarn. I then picked up stitches from the I-Cord cast off and knitted the rest of the hat using my Feral Stranded technique. One yarn was always a ribbon yarn in various shades of red………the other was always a smooth or textured yarn………… again in various shades of red.

The distinctive shape of the top of the hat came from a somewhat prolonged decrease regime combined with the firmness of the stranded knitting. I finished off the point with a small loop of purl side I-Cord made with the tie off yarns from the hat.

This hat was made with left over yarns from the Barrier Reef Shawl. As was the hat that Kate is wearing in the photo of the Reef Shawl.

This photograph doesn't show the band of the hat………it's made using a knit weave technique combining a medium blue/green mohair loop yarn and a varying thickness wool yarn in medium browns and jungle greens plied with a brownish thread. This latter yarn would not get a beauty award on its own but it complements the mohair loop yarn quite well.

What you can see are the multiple short ends of the great range of coloured and textured yarns used in the Barrier Reef Shawl. I have knit woven these in for the first two thirds or so of the crown of the hat creating a fun splay of yarns that sit well on the band. The last third of the crown combines a smooth yarn and a mohair glitzy yarn in a knit weave stitch.

Making this hat also gave me a chance to try out the Super Garter technique on more than the original samples. The third important element was learning how to do short rows.

I was searching through my God Mother Phyl's folder of patterns and ideas and came across a single sheet called Short Row Beret………it looked like a quickly written out pattern that might have been exchanged at tennis or such. Once I started checking out the pattern I realised that I had used the turning technique quite often days past when I knitted from quite complicated patterns. What I was surprised and delighted by most was the shaping that occurred with the frequency and placement of the short rows. I decided to put more stitches between the two regions of short row turning so that I would get a hat that would cover the ears.

This is the hat that emerged………….it's a little tight round the bottom edge because the short row regime at that edge was too frequent………..but it remains a sample that I'm very pleased with.

This was the next hat I made after the sample one…………I put even more rows between the short row turning regions so that the turn back would be wider…………and I did fewer short rows at the bottom edge. This solved the tightness problem of the sample hat but gave enough firmness to hold the turn back neatly round the ears.

This hat was made for Charmaine…….a friend who was very clear that her head and ears need to be warm when she walks the dogs on cold Canberra mornings! I understand that the hat fills the bill splendidly.