Hello friends,

I have a knitting project start and finish to show you today. Ever since I finished my latest blanket some months ago, I've been procrastinating over which knitting project to do/finish next.

I've got a pair of socks, and also a set of leg warmers on the go, but I wasn't feeling like working on them while it was so warm outside. And then I wasn't happy with my socks so I frogged them, and then procrastinated some more about knitting the yarn up with a different sock pattern..

But then while I was cleaning up my craft room I found a knitting project bag with 100 grams of DK weight possum/merino yarn that I'd hand dyed a sage green for a knitting project with the pattern Gro Hat by Fiber Tales. I instantly fell back in love with the project, especially the leaf pattern around the hat, and started knitting the pattern.

First up I needed to learn a new cast on method for the edge of the hat, Italian Tubular cast on, which ended up being similar to other cast on methods I've learned, so that was okay. Then I knitted the ribbing at the bottom of the hat, which folded over at the end. After that was switching needles to a bigger size, and plain knitting for a while. All that was relatively easy.

After that came all the hard parts, and at this stage I wish I had put in a safety line before the cable and lace section, as it would've made the pattern knitting way less stressful. My advice to anyone considering this pattern would be to do the following in the cable and lace sections: put in a safety line at the start, put stitch markers and the beginning of each repeated section, so it's easy to frog back to a section in a row if necessary. And the last thing I would suggest is to knit the k1yok1 repeats much looser than you think, because if that repeat is too tight, it makes it super hard to do the cables in the next row.

Once the tricky part of the cables and lace work is done, the rest of the hat is pretty easy to knit until the finish. I have done both cables and lace work in knitting before, but this pattern was tricky for me to do. Just a thing to note is that this pattern has only one size, and you can't upscale it or downscale it easily without ruining the repeats.

And here is the finished Gro Hat knitted up before blocking, as you can see, you can see the stitches between the DPNs, are slightly wider vertical rows. It was unfortunate, but I hoped it would come out in blocking.

I gave the hat a nice and long soaking in luke warm water and wool wash, and then blocked the hat using a head mannequin covered in a plastic bag.

And here is the finished hat.

I absolutely love the finished hat, and especially in the sage colour, as it just really matches so well with the leaves. I'm glad that I stuck it out and finished the hat despite the trickiness of the cable and lace section. I think the pattern is totally worth knitting but it's good to be aware of the trickiness. I can't wait to wear this hat all winter long.

Have a wonderful day

Julie-Ann

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Tags: 2025, Cables, Double Knit, Gro Hat, Knitting, Knitting Project, Lace, Possum/Merino, Winter