garter rib hat

There are a lot of amazing hat patterns out there, from people who understand shaping and texture and all that. But somehow, I have not a single “normal” hat in the basket near the door. I have a little beaded slouch, and a great not-knitted store-bought fake-fur-lined hat that I rely on to get me through the coldest days, but I didn’t just have A HAT. One that I could pull on and just wear, no thinking. I wanted to knit it the same way—no frought process, no fussy stitch pattern. Just a hat.

It’s funny, I used to knit basically nothing but hats. When I rekindled my love of knitting in college, it was with a group that knit hats for the homeless. We knit all-stockinette hats with a curled brim or k1,p1 with a folded cuff, and I made a ton—for the group, family, and friends. But that was fifteen years ago, and I don’t know what happened to all the hats I’ve knit myself in the meantime. But all that changed last week!

This yarn, Primo Aran, was actually given to me by Plucky Knitter herself, when I bought some other yarn. She’d seen me holding this color for a while before deciding to go in a completely different direction. I had made it pretty clear that this was “my color,” and she insisted I take it with me. It was so so nice of her. Last fall I started a hat with it but I picked a pattern that didn’t exactly work with my gauge and stitch count, so I was fudging it as I went. I got into the decreases and it got confusing, so I set it aside.

When I picked it up two weeks ago, I had no idea what my intentions had been with the decreases. So I ripped, cast back on, and planned something simple and dead easy. I grabbed my size 8s, did a tubular cast on, rearranging the 96 stitches to a 2×2 rib, and worked that for 2 inches. then I switched to 2×2 garter rib. No increases after the ribbing, just the pattern shift. When I deemed it plenty long (longer than to be worn tight like a toque, but not too long as to be a giant slouchy thing) I decreased it away. I had a system at the time, one that I surely could not recreate, that involved decreasing evenly within the purls, then in the knits, then pulling it all together. But no matter: it’s a finished hat! A hat!

In the end, I started the hat on a Thursday and wove in the ends Friday night (after movie night with friends). I blocked it that weekend and the following Thursday, Pamela Wynne took these pictures of me on a cold, slightly snowy day on the Lower East Side. Easy-peasy.