Spirals & Nupps beret

Late last winter, just about barely in time to be able to wear it before the weather turned too warm for hats, I knitted this:



There has been a request on Ravelry for a pattern. Unfortunately, I can't provide one. I made up the hat as I went along, and it didn't all turn out quite as I'd intended as the ribbing band proved to be much too loose when it was done and I persuaded the hat to fit properly by folding the band up and sewing it down on the inside of the hat. To put out anything resembling a coherent pattern, I'd have to re-knit the thing and adjust the stitch counts to come up with a band that actually fits, and I don't see that happening in the foreseeable future.

What I can do, though, is provide a chart of the stitch pattern for people to use with their own favourite basic beret recipe, and here it is for your enjoyment:

For those who haven't done nupps before, the k1 (yo k1) 4x is all worked into the same stitch, giving you nine stitches on the right needle all growing out of one foundation stitch. In the next row, you knit all nine together again. This can be difficult if you're a tight knitter. One solution is to knit, say, the first three nupp stitches together in one go, then slip the resultant stitch back to the left needle and pass the remaining nupp stitches over (either all in one go, in groups, or individually) before slipping the same stitch back to the right needle. Alternatively, you can reduce the number of loops that make up the nupp by doing k1 (yo k1) 3x, giving you a seven-stitch nupp.

Work the decreases on the crown of the beret in every second row. Decrease one stitch per horizontal pattern repeat, purling together two of the purl stitches in the first decrease row and knitting together the two knit stitches adjacent to the nupp in the second decrease row.