Alan and I went to a fabulous Culinary Historians of Canada event on Saturday. It was the tenth and final version of “Mad for Marmalade” at Fort York in Toronto. Luckily they are going to replace it with a similar event about comfort foods. Hours of demos and workshops gave me ample time to get going on this hat. I finished it this morning, since I had virtually no time to work on it on Sunday, which was taken up with another shoe making class. I will be returning to Toronto to finish the shoes next weekend and will post about them if they are not too embarrassing. I have now come home for a rest!

I decided that since the bottom of this hat wouldn’t curl because of all the cabling, I would leave it without anything else. I was fully prepared to pick up and knit down from the cast on edge if I wasn’t happy, but I think it is fine as is. I cast on 118 stitches and used Aran Diamonds with Popcorns, pg 256, Flying Buttress, pg 257 and Fancy Bobble Cable, pg 262. I added an extra purl stitch on each side of the two Fancy Bobble Cables. I like nothing better than figuring out how to get rid of cables at the top. I am not sure I am completely thrilled as the Flying Buttress are kind of clunky in my opinion. I was ok with how I got rid of the other cable patterns.

When I started to decrease the bobble cable, I had to take 4 stitches back 3 rows and turn them from knits into purls. I did this one stitch at a time and it worked fine. I have found that if you try to rip back too many stitches at once, it gets increasingly difficult. I found at one point, I had made a mistake 4 rows down on the flying buttress. The mistake involved two cablings. I tried to reknit the 5 stitches involved, but ended up with a dog’s breakfast and ripped the whole hat back 4 rows instead.