Elemental Hats - Toph and Korra

The hat craze continues. I have completed two hats from Woolly Wormhead's Elemental collection, Toph and Korra.

Here's Toph:

I just love how the short row sections nestle into each other so organically. The hat is carefully designed so that the final fabric is flat, even though it seems REALLY wavy while you're knitting it. This is how the pattern looked as I began:

The provisional cast on is along the bottom. This is one pattern repeat; there are eight in all. At the end, you remove the provisional cast on and graft the stitches in garter:

The graft is a 4-step sequence, just like kitchener stitch, except a little different because kitchener is a stockinette graft and this is a garter stitch graft. It worked great!

My contrast yarn - the "goldenrod" - came in two mini skeins which were not exactly the same depth of shade. I alternated skeins every few leaves. Perhaps I should have alternated with every single leaf, but I didn't. If you think you are seeing different yellows, you're not wrong.

This Buoy DK yarn is a blend of Bluefaced Leicester, Shetland, and Manx Loaghtan, and it's a rather toothy yarn. I used a 2.75 mm needle in order to get gauge, and the fabric is a tad stiff at that gauge. You can tell that the slouchy part isn't really slouching much on its own. It will wear GREAT, though.

I immediately cast on another pattern in the collection, Korra. I have some old Silky Wool in stash left over from another project, and a friend passed me some of her leftover Silky Wool from another project, so I have two nicely contrasting yarns. This yarn is thinner than Buoy, and the silk adds a lot of drape. Here's what this hat looked like after one pattern repeat:

This design is repeated 18 times. The interesting thing is that there are nine different placements for the leaf motif. It doesn't matter what order you work them in, as long as you use each placement twice - if you do that, you'll get a flat fabric in the end. Here's the finished hat, after blocking:

This hat definitely has a bit more drape than the first one:

This hat was so addictive to knit. I cranked it out in 5 days, which is pretty fast for me. And then, I immediately cast on for another hat in the collection! 

I cast on for a sweater over the winter break, but knit the hem on one side and then just stopped. I wasn't feeling it. But hats seem to be just the right speed right now, even challenging hats. Since the goal of my knitting is primarily to make me happy, I'm going to keep going on this hat knitting streak.