Look at the fabulous new hat form my friend Jen gave me!  Her brother found it in her grandmother’s basement.  Apparently, Jen’s great grandmother was a milliner and this may have been hers.  Anyway, it is shiny and ceramic and I love it, no matter who owned it before, but I do hope it was a historic milliner.  I have decided to go Christmas, so I am only going to knit with red, white and green until then. I saved the last balls of red and white alpaca for this hat and have purchased some Cascade 220 Superwash in each of the colours to continue with.  I am going to put the rest of the alpaca on hold until after Christmas.

Everyone at the knitting guild seems hepped up on fancy cast on and offs these days so I got a book from the library by Leslie Ann Bestor called Cast On Bind Off and used her two-color braided cast on.  I think the alpaca may be too fine to show this cast on to full advantage, but I had already cast on twice so I left it.  I cast on 120 stitches again then did four rows of red garter stitch followed by two plain white rows before starting the pattern.  I used Two-Color Cable Rib, pg 70 for the main part of the hat.  This pattern has an 8 stitch repeat, so there were 15 cables.  I got rid of 5 of them first, did two full repeats, then got rid of 5 more, did two and got rid of the rest. 

I had knitted the Santa hats into the decorative band, but I felt that they weren’t standing out as much as I would like, so I outlined them in red.