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.

This is a companion to Collusion and Entrapment (the blue and purple hats in the pictures at the bottom of this page).

Misprision noun concealment of knowledge of a felony or treason

So I love seeing everyone else’s beautiful, intricate, multi-color masterpieces. I do. But if I’m being totally honest, the idea of making my own scares me. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of proper colorwork. And if we’re being super honest, I feel a little scared combining colors, too.

But this? This I can do (and if I can do it, you can too).

All you need is a nice, quiet, respectable background yarn and a slightly flashier contrast yarn. Then you just sit back and let the stitch pattern do all the work.

It’s easy (you’re only dealing with one yarn on any given row), it’s fun (I may possibly have found myself saying boop boop boop every time I made one of the nubblies), and it looks awfully cute when you’re done. And, if you happened to use a more variegated yarn for your contrast yarn? Well then it will look even more like you were doing fancy (cough, intimidating) things with colors!

The hat is written in five sizes (castons of 96, 100, 104, 108, and 112 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 yarn (you want something dense enough that you don’t see the contrasting yarn behind your fabric).

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 150 yards of the gray and 100 yards of the pink yarn 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 200 yards of the main color and 125 yards of the contrast yarn.

This is perfect for you if:

• You share my secret fear of proper colorwork, but want don’t want to miss out on all that pretty
• You have some extra bits of fancy yarn you’re looking to show off
• You can’t help wondering how that would look as a cowl (there might just be secret cowl instructions hidden away in there)

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)