Are there buy buttons on the side of the page? If so, you've caught this pattern on one of the handful of days every year when it's available! If not, read on for details of where it went and what to do if you want to be notified the next time it's available.

A few years ago I got overwhelmed by my back catalog, retired most of my earlier work, and launched Tiny Nonsense. That gave me space to make Cool New Stuff! But some people missed the earlier things, so I make many of the retired patterns available for a few days once or twice a year.

• If you see the buy buttons on this page, you’ve caught it on one of the days it’s available! You can buy it just like usual.

• If you don’t see the buy buttons on this page, then it’s not currently available. It will probably be available the week after Thanksgiving and for a few days in June or July.

• If you want to hear when the retired patterns come back, subscribe to the mailing list or patreon, or keep an eye on my instagram.

Midst noun the middle point, part, or stage

Low effort, high impact. That’s what I’m looking for in my knitting these days. And this really does the job. All that stockinette is as mellow as it gets. And the stripe is ever so much more distracting than it has any right to be. You put the two together and somehow both the knitting and the finished product are a little bit magical.

A lot of the magic really comes down to the yarn. Of course you can use solids or semi solids and it will look great (those yarns pretty much always look great no matter what). But if you have a speckled yarn, or a super variegated yarn, or some other highly opinionated yarn that you can’t quite figure out what to do with…well this is what you do with it. You give it lots of stockinette so it doesn’t feel crowded (so many obstreperous yarns just need a little space to shine on their own terms without any patterning to obscure their charms). Then you find a fuzzy yarn that works nicely with one of the colors in your opinionated yarn, and you sit back and watch the two of them play together.

You really are going to have fun (which is good, since I have it on good authority that these hats often end up getting claimed by anyone who sees them, so you may well end up making more than one)!

The hat is written in six sizes (castons of 88, 96, 104, 112, 120, and 128 stitches), and you should feel free to adjust your gauge a bit to fine tune the fit of the hat. Just be sure that you’re working at a gauge that gives you a fabric you like with your chosen yarns!

I recommend working at something around 4.5, 5, 5.5, or 6 stitches per inch, and I’ve included a table to help you figure out what gauge you’ll want to use for your size. With that range of sizes and gauges, the hat will fit a head between 17.5 and 25.5 inches (with lots of points in between).

Oh, and just to help you plan, I used about 175 yards of the main yarn (the gray yarn) and 50 yards of the contrast yarn (the pink one) to make a hat for a large adult. If you’re making a bigger or taller hat (or if you use a skinnier yarn), you might want more like 225 yards of the main yarn and 60 yards of the contrast yarn yarn.

This is perfect for you if:

• You’ve got an absolutely glorious yarn (or a particularly opinionated one) you want to show off
• You need some autopilot knitting that still looks impressive

It’s not for you if:

• You don’t like charts (the pattern uses charts)
• You hate swatching (you need to swatch to check your needle size)