I finished my Oslo Hat – Mohair edition (pattern by Petite Knit) in time to keep my head warm during a very cold week.

How cold was it? This cold:

Yes, I know that it is not Ottowa cold, or Edmonton cold, or Wisconsin cold, or even Boston cold, but it is most definitely England cold, and my poor system isn’t used to it.

The resulting hat is pretty, but I must say that I had some issues with this pattern. It is written in a Scandinavian style, which is spare compared to the very precise and articulated patterns we have become accustomed to in the download era. I have commented before about this with respect to Danish patterns. As someone who knows how to knit, I don’t really have a problem with the spare style, but there are a few more serious issues here. First of all, there is a mistake in the pattern. In the directions for the decreases, she leaves out a critical K1, K2tog at the beginning of Round 1. If you’ve knit lots of hats, you can just scratch your head for a minute and say “huh, something’s missing here” and figure it out. But if you are not practiced at this, it will mess up your decreases, and thus the crown shaping. I ended up substituting a “ssk” instead of a “sl1, k1, pass sl st over” in the decreases as well; I think it is neater. The finished crown is nice, but beware the directions!

More critical for me is that the pattern has a odd construction. The bottom portion of the hat is doubly folded, meaning that the brim has three warm layers. The first fold is knitted in, that is, the fabric is folded over and knitted together. Then, she has you knit for a few rounds on the wrong side before reversing direction with a short row and continuing to knit on the right side. She gives no reason for doing this, and no photos to show what it is supposed to look like. This, by the way, is what it looks like:

When you wear it, you fold up the brim again, to get the three layers. I still can’t figure out the purpose of the purled ridge. It means that the fold is not neat. There is no clear fold line. Every time I wear it, I have to fiddle with the fold so that it doesn’t look weird. I don’t know why this annoys me so much, but suffice it to say that it annoys me. I notice that there are over 4000 of these hats posted on Ravelry, so I think I may be in the minority here, but next time, I would just skip the pattern directions and wing it.

I knitted this with some old Malabrigo fingering weight yarn from my stash together with some mohair, also from stash. I always keep yarn labels, which drives Doug crazy, and literally yesterday I decided to just toss away the labels on my desk, and of course they were these ones! There is a reason to my label-keeping madness, Doug! I think this shade of Malabrigo was called “paper”, but in any case, it’s white. I have enough left over to make another hat.

I’ve noticed this last week or two that Doug seems to have confiscated my red hat. I have finished this one just in time. I hope that, wherever you are, you are keeping warm and dry, and keeping hold of your hat.