My non-slouchy slouchy hat

After all this spinning, I thought I should do a bit of knitting. So what did I do? Knit something with yarn I bought at the Royal Winter Fair.

It was a soft squooshy 100g skein from Sonny's Llama Farm. I found it in a basket at the Llama display. Now that I'm on Ravelry, it has changed my knitting. It's so great to be able to look up an item and find lots of patterns, even free ones, and then see what it looked like when other people made it.

This hat is my first Ravelry project! Here's the link:
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/needlebook/slouchy-copy-cat-hat
but I think you may need to be a member to view projects on Ravelry.

The pattern was for a slouchy hat but I didn't have enough yarn, so I shortened it to make a regular hat that would use up my skein as much as possible. Finishing a project and having just a short tail of yarn leftover is one of my big thrills in life. I love this hat! The pattern calls for worsted and my yarn was aran weight (a bit heavier) so it turned out really warm and squishy. Also llama yarn can be super warm, so the eyelets should help. The pattern is so easy, once you do the four rows for the first time, you can see where you are and carry on without looking at the pattern. And the eyelet mock cable stitch is very pretty.

In case you're not on Ravelry, the free pattern is here. I made another change in mine which was decreasing in the pattern. I thought it would look nice if I did that, especially as mine isn't slouchy. Here are my notes on that:

FINISHED
Note: I started decreasing after 5 1/4" instead of 8 1/2"
I changed the pattern so that it decreased in the pattern instead of all knit. It worked really well by ending on Row 3 of the Eyelet Mock Cable stitch, then decreasing as follows:

Row 1: K, YO, K, P2tog
Row 2: K3, P1
Row 3: SL1, K2, PSSO, P1
Row 4: K2, P1
Row 5: K2TOG, P1
Row 6: K1, P1
Row 7 on: same as pattern.