This pattern is retired and not usually available. However, I make many of my retired patterns available for a few days twice a year, and this is one of those times! It will be available from now through some time on Monday, December 2. Then it will go away again.

In the summer of 2022, I realized that I found maintaining a back catalog of hundreds of patterns overwhelming. I couldn’t do it and still release new things. So I took my old patterns down so I could keep doing new work.

A few favorites have come back, and lots of new things have come out! But the vast majority of the old patterns are retired and are no longer generally available.

However, enough folks have asked about old favorites that I make many of the retired patterns available for a few days twice a year (usually in early summer and around Thanksgiving).

• If you see the buy buttons on this page, you’ve caught it on one of the days it’s available!
• If you don’t see the buy buttons on this page, then it’s not currently available.
• If you want to hear when the retired patterns are available, subscribe to the mailing list or patreon, or keep an eye on my instagram.

Obstreperous adjective stubbornly resistant to control

This is a companion to Incorrigible (the mitts in the picture at the bottom of this page).

I’m not a big fan of rules. Well, let’s break that down a bit. I’m not a big fan of someone else coming along and telling me ‘you have to do it this way, it’s the rule’ without actually explaining to me just what those rules are and why I should follow them.

And colorwork seems to have a lot of rules (at least according to a certain vocal subset of knitters). Make sure your yarns are the same weight. Use one yarn at a time. Carry each color across the whole piece. Keep your floats short. Turns out, you can break each and every one of those rules and still come out with an awfully nifty project.

If you feel up to a little bout of rule breaking and decide to make this, you’ll use different weight of yarns (one should be a fluffy lace weight, the other can be anything from fingering through worsted weight). Sometimes you’ll hold both yarns together, sometimes you’ll use just one. You’ll use the fluffy yarn on only part of the hat. And you’ll make scandalously long floats (that you will later cut short in an act of unspeakably satisfying knitterly defiance).

And in the end, after all that scandalous flouting of the rules, you’ll have a lovely, tidy, orderly hat (which will be all the more delightful because you know you someone out there would be scandalized by how you put it together).

The hat is written in five sizes (castons of 100, 108, 116, 124, and 132 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 5.5, 6, 6.5, or 7 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 17.25 and 24.75 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 100 yards of the contrast yarn (the orange 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 150 yards of the contrast yarn yarn. I was able to comfortably get a hat and matching mitts for a large adult from one 100g skein of fingering weight yarn and one 25g skein of laceweight 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)