Heather went to Peru a couple of years ago with her Scout troop.  She brought me back some medium brown alpaca.  It has been waiting in the freezer since then.  I bought a mixed bunch of colours this time to go with it.  Two balls each of five different colours.  I will now make as many hats as 20 balls of Indiecita DK Baby Alpaca will do.  One hundred and twenty stitches will probably be my baseline number of stitches for this yarn.  It is a finer yarn than the worsted weight I have been using for a while.  It has 5.5 st to the inch on 4 mm needles vs 5 st to the inch on 4.5 mm for the worsted.  I like 120 stitches, it is divisible by 3, 4, 5. 6, 8, 10, 12 and 15 so it gives lots of scope for pattern repeats as well as decreasing.

For this hat, I cast on the 120 stitches and did 14 rows of Woven Stitch, pg 95 with turqouise., Then I  joined back into the cast on edge with white.  I did 2 1/4 inches of Bubble Tweed, pg 66, then back to Woven Stitch for 10 rows, then joined back in again to form a roll.  I then used Twisted Basket Stitch, pg 118 for the top of the hat.  There were 15 repeats of the Twisted Basket Pattern, I decreased in every third one, leading to 5 points of decrease.  I used double decreases every other row to the top.  it went as planned from the beginning and I didn’t have to rip out at all along the way.