It is one thing to see the little knitted black and white photo of a stitch in The Book, and it is another thing entirely to expect myself to instantly imagine a hat that works for the stitch. It does happen sometimes, like the tam using the triangular stitch last week. I just had to keep faith in the vision and carry it through. I must say I was pretty chuffed with the final project, although several people have laughed when I modelled it for them. A few others, however, share my taste.
For this particular hat, knew I was doing the Dots and Dashes from page 81 all along, but the hat changed several times before it finished. I cast on 100 stitches and did the garter stitch rainbow, I increased to 110 stitches because of the anticipated draw-in of the colour work and thought I would do the dots and dashes in black for a while, then do a rainbow somewhere in the same stitch and go back to black, like the last hat where I subbed the rainbow in for one repeat, and resulted in a hat I was OK with. As soon as I started the pattern, I realized that plan was not going to fly. I had thought that the garter stitch dots and dashes rainbow would echo that in the border and things would be OK, but I realized it just wasn’t going to work somehow. I then thought I would just go with black dots and dashes to the top and put a topper to echo the base. I kept going, but after a couple of inches, my vision was fading again. Too busy, with not enough strength in the pattern to carry a whole hat. It was definitely proving to be a “smaller doses” pattern stitch. 
I decided to go to black for the bulk of the hat, which would tone it down and hopefully show off the dots and dashes a bit. I looked at the next stitch in each of the chapters that dealt with single colours. Giant Diamond Pattern, pg 32 was the winner. I had to decrease to 105 stitches to get to 7 repeats of the pattern. It is just a simple knit/purl pattern so there is no draw in at all and has a 15 stitch repeat, 90 would be too few for an adult hat, 105 is on the large side, but so be it. I used 7 points of decrease and stacked the sl 1, k2tog, psso’s on top of each other above the big purled diamonds of the last row of the pattern. I decreased every other row to 21 stitches. i then did knit 1, k2tog knit 2, knit 2 together around and ended up with 15 stitches and did a garter stitch rainbow again, then went back to the base and filled in with black. It has a bit of a Mulan vibe, but I am binge watching Once Upon a Time at the moment. They have a lot of knitting I wish I had done.
it was a lovely setting with lots of peacocks both regular 
and white wandering around. A couple of days ago a guy told me they were mating when he was there, but that seemed to be over, sadly.
gillianknits 