It's the Arriccia Hat

AND it's a free pattern! A little holiday gift for knitters from me, Arriccia is challenging enough to be interesting, but not difficult once you get the hang of it. It's worked in the round from the bottom up, and is a great way to show off the colors of a yarn like Madelinetosh Tosh DK. The subtle striping you see is because I alternated from two skeins of the "Amber Trinket" colorway, which shows a fair amount of variation between skeins.

If you plan to knit the adult size, just don't expect it to be a one-skein wonder-- not even with 100 gram skeins of MTDK (although you might just eke out the version with no pompom, especially if you skip the swatching), and certainly not with 50 gram skeins of anything-- the crimping (arricciare means "to crimp" in Italian) around the brim eats up a fair amount of yarn.

The stitch pattern that inspired this hat is Lynne Barr's "Folded Fabric," from her book Reversible Knitting. In this stitch pattern, stitches are picked up several rows below the stitches on the needle, and worked together with those stitches to create folds that pull gently in alternate directions. I modified "Folded Fabric" for this hat because when I work wide ribs, the stitches on the left side of the knit columns are looser than the others, and I found that when I reversed the direction in which the folds pulled, it created tension on those looser stitches, making them into more a structural element than well, an embarrassment.*

There are no charts to read in this pattern (directions are written out), but I do include two series of photos to help explain the process for creating the folds.

*This is a common problem for knitters. I have tried various ways of fixing it in my knitting-- pulling the yarn tight when I knit the last knit st and purl the first purl st of the ribbed columns; trying to keep the yarn at the tips of the needles for those stitches; correcting the yarn tension on the following row. None of the above seem to work for me. If you have a method that works for you other than the above, I'd like to hear it!