Fair Isle Finish

I finished my Fair Isle-inspired hat for C. this week and just in time too. There's a Nor'easter in my area and we even have snow on the ground. That's early for these neck of the woods.

It was an involved, but fun project to make. Here's the original inspiration hat again:

Early on I decided that I wanted it to have earflaps. And I decided to minimize the orange color (C. has red hair so I love orange on him, but he has an orange winter coat this year and I didn't want to go overboard.)

The darker gray top was made one night a little impulsively; I wasn't really following the pattern and I didn't have the original picture in front of me. Turns out I had to rip it all out the next day b/c the top was way too long and C. looked like a conehead.

Instead I added a multicolor pom pom.

Here's a peek of it on the Little Man.

It's definitely a departure from the original, but I really like it and it looks cute on him, so I'm pretty happy with the end result. I would like to try more fair isle or stranded knitting sometime soon. It was also really fun to play around with the knitting graph software too. Maybe I'll even design my own original designs at some point? Who knows.