In Progress: Fair Isle Hat

About two years ago, I purchased a kit for a traditional, stranded fair-isle hat. And it has sat in my stash all that time, because I didn’t have the nerve to try to knit it.

But after re-discovering it after cleaning up my craft corner, I thought I’d pull it out and give it a try. The instructions were simple, and after all, it’s just knitting. If I mess it up, I can unravel it and try again.

I cast on in some super soft cotton yarn, and knit about 2.5 inches to make a lining. This seemed to take *forever* because I was really excited to get to the stranded knitting. Eventually, I was working with two colors of fairly sticky wool:

Ruby was unimpressed with my mad knitting skills.

And really, it wasn’t so hard. Keeping track of the colors reminded me a little of the cross-stitch patterns I used to follow. And I was pretty comfortable keeping the yarn on both hands without much difficulty.

One thing I did for the first time was let the yarn floats, um, float, rather than weave them in as I went along (aka, the Philosopher’s Wool technique – this link has a video). I still like that technique, but I tend to tighten my gauge when I do it, so I need more practice.

Here’s a shot of the finished hat from the inside, with the floats visible:

The snowmen are taking an unusual interest in my hat.

The hat still needs blocked to even out the stitches, then the hem sewn up inside. But I’m really impressed with how easy this was, really. It took a bit more concentration than a plain hat, but it definitely wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.

Wow, if that was so easy, what’s next? Argyle socks?

OK, maybe not.