Pandemic Tam

After finishing my Wisby Mittens in March, I was feeling pretty good about stranded knitting. I decided to get out the three balls of Lalland I bought in Scotland, which I intended to knit into the Coda Beret. I loved the samples I saw in Di Gilpin's shop in Fife:

But after looking at the pattern more closely, I became disenchanted with it. It was entirely written (not charted), and not very well written at that. It was hard to follow. And - this is a pet peeve of mine - the only way to change sizes is to adjust the needle size. That's a cheat in my book. I was already a bit worried about the hat being a bit small for my head (see photo of me trying one of these on in the shop), and the pattern didn't make me confident.

I decided to revisit my pattern choice. Lalland is sport weight, so I limited my search in Ravelry to berets/tams with 3 colors of sportweight yarn. To my surprise, there were ONLY 11 results. 11! I didn't love them, at least any that were readily available. I wanted a more contemporary design (Coda influenced me there) and so many stranded hat designs are more traditional. My gut told me to search the same parameters, but to increase the number of colors to 4. And that's how I found Fayne, my current hat crush:

Now you might recall that I only had 3 colors of Lalland in stash. They were Storm Petrel (deep blue with maybe a hint of green in it), Furze (yellow), and Silver Birch (gray):

I remembered that The Knot House in nearby Frederick, MD, was listed as a stockist for this unique yarn. I emailed and Cathy said that they had a few balls left on the clearance table. One was a gray (perhaps the same one I already had) and the other was Coral in this cheerful orange. I grabbed it! Or rather, I quickly provided my credit card info over the phone, and Cathy mailed it to me (this was after the COVID-19 shutdown was in place).

I used Coral as color D, the least frequently used color, so it would serve as just a little pop. I made a couple of small swatches and thankfully got perfect gauge on the second try:

And then I was off to the races. Lalland isn't the easiest yarn to work with because it's a loose cable construction yarn, but I knew this and was able to accommodate its idiosyncrasies. The result is a strong but soft fabric that will be extra warm thanks to the doubled yarn on the back side. But oh, the ends!

I blocked the hat over a large dinner plate in order to get the beret/tam shaping. Here's an interesting article about the difference between a beret and a tam.

I've been calling my hat a tam because the yarn is from Scotland, but it turns out that I'm right to do so, because I don't wear it like a tilted plate atop my head. But to be a true tam, it should include a pom pom. The pattern actually calls for one, but I left it off.

After we got the "good" shots, I pretended to be Mary Tyler Moore for a minute. You will also see that I only dressed for the photo shoot from the waist up - below are my comfy WFH pants and the crocs I slip on to run around the yard!

To paraphrase the theme song, we might just make it after all!