I was sorting out my spare bits and pieces of the Cascade 220 and Cascade Bentley I have been using lately and this bunch of balls caught my eye, so I decided to do a hat with them.

I made a rookie mistake and the second band was puckering because the colour work and ribbing both pulled in. I took it back a couple of inches and did the decrease before instead of on the last row (from 108 stitches for the Eccentric Check, pg 80 to 100 stitches for the Little Shell Rib, pg 47).  I had started out at the bottom with 110 stitches on the ribbing and decreased 2 stitches to start the colour work.

Every time I see my friend Jen from pottery school and we talk about my hats, I feel like I am not artistic enough with them, so the next hat ends up some weird shape.  I finished the hat while I was talking to Heather and I sent her a picture, she asked about the stitches.  Her comment was “that’s eccentric alright”.  To decrease at the top, I had two points of decrease for a very slow decrease.  The pattern had a natural decrease point where you reduce within the ribbing by doing a slip one, k2tog psso in the knitted part.  I just didn’t do the k1, p1, k1 in that stitch on the next row, I just knit it, then when I came back, I did a p3tog on top of it, then next row a p2tog to finish getting rid of the repeat.  I like to use the natural decreases in the pattern wherever possible because I feel it gives continuity.  I did the next decrease to the right of the previous  one each time until I had two repeats left at the top and did the finishing.  The top wouldn’t flop, like the Santa hat I did before Christmas. Stockinette had no integrity, so it folds easily.  When you have a lot of patterning, things get stiffer.

Sorry about the pictures, but I had lost the light and this puppy ain’t getting any better tomorrow anyway.