From this:

To this:

To this:

Wait, I should be smiling:

Phew. That was a challenging project. Thankfully, I love the end product, but it was a load of work to get there.

Buffalo Bills Throwback Helmet Hat
Pattern: my own design, based on my Dad’s request and a picture of an old helmet.
Neeldes: US 7
Yarn: Cascade 220 in navy and white, Plymouth Galway in red.
Start: Dec. 2007.
Finish: Jan. 2008.

How I Did It

• The hat was knit back and forth in rows using the intarsia technique.
• When the length reached 6″, I began the crown shaping by decreasing four stitches on each row on either side of the stripes (in the white section, leaving the stripes intact). The reason I did it this way was because I had just knit Whitney’s 70′s Hat from The Purl Bee. It used the same type of shaping and I thought it would give me the round helmet-y shape I was going for, while preserving the stripe placement.

• When there were 15 stitches left in the white section on each side, I began working back and forth on the front stripes only, joining it to the white section by *working to one stitch before the end of the row then ssk (or p2tog, if you’re on the purl side). Turn. Sl 1.* Repeat until all the white stitches have been consumed. Got it?
• Then, I grafted the front stripes to the back stripes, and sewed the back seam using mattress stitch.
• It was too big, so I had to felt it. Luckily I had the good sense to thread a strand of cotton through the back loops of the cast-on edge to facilitate the picking up of stitches for the hem, which I did post-felting. Unfortunately I did not have the good sense of grabbing the camera for pictures of this part of the process. I felted by hand, and that was something I had never done before.
• Here’s something fantastic I learned: To match the right leaning decrease of a k2tog on the purl side, you use p2tog. Well okay, I did know that, but I had no idea what the left leaning decrease would be on the purl side. So, thanks to my handy Vogue Knitting book, I learned that you do it thusly: s1 knitwise, s1 knitwise, put those stitches back on the left needle and p2tog through the back loop. Booya.

Now we just wait to see if my Dad likes it!