After knitting up a bunch of my original Foray into Fair Isle hats, I was ready for something new. So I picked a Fair Isle pattern that was wider, and a little more complex. But every time I knit it, it looked awful. I put the whole thing in time out (or maybe I put myself in time out - for a little self-reflection). As I thought about it, I realized there was too much contrast between the colors in the yarn, and it distracted from the pattern. Which was a lightbulb moment. Because the opposite of high contrast, with its abrupt transitions, is gradient: a series of related colors that gradually shift from lighter values to darker values.

So I created this pattern as a simple recipe, to try out different gradients. You’ll pick out three yarns for your gradient, and for design purposes, just think of them as one color. Choose a coordinating Main Color for the hat. Then there’s two colors as accents, to form a single row of bright contrasting colors, right through the center of the pattern. I dumped all my yarn out, and chose a couple of different gradients and started knitting. I was really pleased with the result. And I’m learning a lot each time I knit another one.

Colors change, depending on the surrounding colors (there’s an app for that: Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color - it’s only available on the iPad, but it’s worth the time to track it down). And choosing different colors also changed the appearance of the diamonds. Sometimes they look like circles and other times they look like beads on a string. I expect I’ll be knitting a bunch more of these hats, and learning a lot more while I do it.

The sample hats are knit from Berroco’s Ultra Alpaca yarn, simply because I had a lot of odds and ends laying around, but you can use any yarn that calls for a size 8 knitting needle. You need about 130 yards of your main color, 8 yards of your gradients, total, and 60 inches each for the contrasting row through the center. The pattern comes with an easy-to-read color chart. So with the right yarn, and some circular knitting needles (size 7 and size 8), you’ll be ready to start knitting as soon as you download it.