Heather does not like this post’s colours…to her they look like watered down Christmas, hence the name of the post.  I was going to do these mittens with the cuff as is and the main part in the green. I made the mistake of asking her opinion in the car and got her honest answer, so I followed her advice and stayed with two colours.  To do otherwise in front of her would have seemed rude.  The stitches are Windowpane Stripes, pg 58 for the cuff and Little Check, pg 21 for the main part of the mitts.  (The beige is not reading correctly in this photo…see the last two hats below for the actual colours)

… I am not all over the colours either, they are just making the best of a bad job these days, but  I almost always actually prefer doing three colours together.  I usually  find it more visually interesting.   I often have a problem when I try to put in a fourth.  Inevitably the fourth will throw off the balance of the first three, or wash out one of them, or make them seem muddy,..the problems quickly mount insurmountably…
The first hat I did was with a ball of brown that I now have a couple of meters left of (and no longer seems to exist), so I went with a beige for the other two hats. I cast on 100 stitches on 4 1/2mm needles using Patons Classic Wool worsted.  I started with the wine colour and did 12 rows of  Twisted Check, pg 20, then joined back into the cast on edge.  I switched to brown and green and used Honeycomb Tweed, pg. 57 for two inches, then switched back to wine and the first stitch for 4 rows.  The main body of the hat is done in brown using Block Stitch or Dice Pattern, pg 19-20 using the seed block stitch, the garter block stitch, the knit/purl block stitch for one repeat each then using Garter and Rib Check, pg 21 before I switched back to  garter block stitch for the decreasing.

This next hat uses Zig Zag Knotted Rib, pg 43 and Van Dyke Check Pattern, pg 222.  I cast on 97 stitches with straight needles to do the ribbing (4 1/2 mm needles and Patons Classic wool, worsted).  I used the straight needles because I wasn’t sure I could recreate the stitch correctly on a round needle.  I switched onto a round needle and decreased one stitch at the beginning/end of the round before starting the main part of the hat.  I. tried to decrease in pattern but the top was not great, so I put the i-cord rose on the top in the wine and green colours.

This is the last hat I am doing in this colourway, at least for now.  It is a bit of a sampler again.  I cast on 100 stitches with same needle and wool as before and did 6 rows of garter stitch before changing to Tricolor Stripe Pattern – woven version first for one repeat, then two rows of garter stitch and one repeat of the stranded version.  After another two rows of garter stitch I did one repeat of Three Color Tweed, pg 61, then two rows of garter stitch and 12 rows of Semi Woven Tweed, pg 60.  

I did the top in just garter stitch, changing the colour after each row.  I used 10 points of decrease and decreased with a purl two together at each on the purl rows (p8, p2tog, etc…).     After the row that gave me 10 stitches left, I did the knit row, then did p2tog around and finished off.  I actually quite like the effect, if I do say so myself.