E-30 Cap

Fred and I used to wake up at 4:45 every morning to grab some coffee before suiting up for a walk along the waterfront. The walkway along Commencement Bay is a 4 mile round trip from one end to the other and back. Although flat, it is a good workout, not to mention the nice views. Every morning we would smile and say "Good Morning" to all the other early birds doing the same thing. One particularly friendly lady often wore an entire outfit of lemon yellow, which included a fine-knit lattice stitch cap with a 1/1 rib fold-up brim. I loved that hat and vowed to one day adapt it for a Figheadh pattern.

This year I decided to work up hat designs for each of my daughters' birthdays and I knew this lattice cap would be perfect for Emily--mostly because the red mohair yarn I'd saved for it was just the thing for her. You see, my Emily is a girly girl and a real child of the 80's. She was born smack dab in the middle of 1980 and spent her formative years listening to Abba and NKOTB and wearing too much fluorescent pink and side ponytails with scrunchies.

The first iteration of the cap was with a lattice stitch with an extra twist at the junctures (seen below left). That was a little too fussy (and increased the hat depth), so I changed to a more simple twist (seen below right). I also made two hats of different depths so Emily could wear one as a slouch hat and one as a beanie.

I sent the hats off to Emily and then began trying samples of it in other yarns. First was Cloud 9 from Cascade. Loved the yarn, but the transition from the rib to the lattice pattern bugged me. The k2 just awkwardly ceased every other time. Not pretty.

The entire rest of the hat made sense. I loved how the crown decrease naturally began from the last C2B (1/1 right cross) and continued up to make a big flower shape on the top.

After I worked in a little twist of the offending alternating k2's of the rib to correspond to the ones at the beginnings of the lattice diamonds, the whole hat made a lot of sense, from cast on to closing the hole at the top. This last sample is made with Aslan Trends Invernal #3752, which is really a DK weight, but I used size 8 needles to make gauge. I wanted a pretty angora blend and this yarn is just that. So soft and pretty.

Emily likes her hats--even the slouch! I hope you like it too. The E-30 Twist Stitch Cap pattern is available as a PDF download and is stocked in a very few shops at the moment. I hope you like it enough to try it!