Secret Knitting: Solemate Hat!

Here was my biggest gift knitting conundrum this year: I wanted to knit Tyler a new hat for work, but he gets too hot if I use wool yarn. Cotton and bamboo blends seem to work well, but I am never very happy with the results (even if he is and dutifully wears the finished hat non-stop). Furthermore, he pretty much only wears black and grey, so I'm very limited with my yarn and color choices.

Luckily, I remembered my favorite pair of socks to wear back when I worked at the salon. They were knit out of Lorna's Laces Solemate yarn, which contains Outlast, a fiber technology that interacts with the body to moderate temperature. Problem solved!

I bought a skein of Solemate in Patina (well, it was labeled as Grand Street Ink, but this skein is definitely not an inky purple-black, it is more of a dark tobacco brown, so I'm guessing it was mis-labeled...or perhaps I need to get my eyes checked!) and cast on for Arkanoid by Wooly Wormhead, which was a great pattern that was easy to memorize but wouldn't be too fancy for Tyler, who tends towards the basic.

I got to the end and realized I hadn't followed the pattern correctly - somehow I'd skipped the crucial row which created the interesting horizontal purl stripes as pictured in the pattern. OOPS! I thought about frogging it and re-knitting it, but then I decided that it looked quite nice the way it was and he would still love it. Besides, I have enough yarn left that I can make a correct version of this hat for him to wear as well!

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