One hat…four sentiments

When I was thinking about doing this hat, I texted both of my kids and said “do you think f… xmas would be too much on a hat”. Within 15 seconds, Heather had responded with “nothing is too much…go big or go home” and Jacob had responded with “can I have the hat?”. His dad took him the hat on the weekend and was supposed to take a photo for this post. He, of course, forgot. I just asked Jake if he had the hat on him and could he send a selfie for the post. This is what I got:

For the knitters: This is a reversible hat which uses two stitches, Houndstooth Check, pg 90 and Shadow Check, pg 103. I put positive Christmas phrases on one side and much less positive phrases when you turn it inside out. Barbara Walker illustrated both sides of the shadow check together in the book. It is a lovely, bulky but not stiff stitch that works really well for a reversible hat. I cast on 100 stitches with a long tail cast on (n.b.110 may have been better), and did one row of purl before switching to knit for the lettering. I worked my way through the Bah! Humbug and F… Xmas side, putting Houndstooth Check in between the sets of lettering. I did one row of plain knit in red when I was finished. I then picked up a set of stitches from the cast on edge and worked my way up the nicer sentiments. I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the how the Houndstooth looked, so I just did a checkerboard instead on the second side. I put a knit row in red above this side too before I joined the two sides together. This avoids having the white purl bumps on one side. I continued up the hat in the shadow check. I used 5 points of decrease. I decreased 10 stitches around (slip one, k2tog, psso 5 times around) on every 6 row repeat until I only had 10 stitches left, then did k2tog around and finished off.