Am I happy with it? Not really. Is it an okay for a second attempt at a beanie & first attempt at mosaic? Yeah, it’ll probably do.

Have fallen in love with the mandala ombre, and Spotlight getting a bunch of mill end bags in with ~3 skeins to the bag… I’ve got a lot of yarn now. Has probably used roughly one skein altogether? I don’t like the brown & would’ve preferred grayscale only, also ideally I would’ve started with black at the bottom & gone lighter (had hoped for the current layout that the white would’ve gone to grey already but eh).

Found a tutorial on a Tunisian ribbing using two skeins at once (will link later) and fortunately my only hook on a cord is a 4.5mm that worked well. Thick and super scrunchy, waaaay more stretch than my SC BLO ribbing attempts have gone. It forms an interesting pattern where one skein’s colour shows one side, and the flipside shows the other. Doesn’t work up super quickly but it’s way easier on my joints where I normally have high tension.

Swatched a couple of fish and kinda went for it after that. I don’t currently have access to my desktop/Excel, so couldn’t be bothered with a repeating pattern & made each fish/the gaps different sizes. Hard to soften corners in mosaic — skipping a st and doubling up on the next drop-down helps a bit. I’m liking how mosaic gives you a chance to fix up mistakes several rows ago e.g. with a treble stitch & anyone who isnt looking closely won’t really notice the difference.

In the round mosaic is interesting, I kinda finished each row with a slst and chained, giving it a marker and leaving until that colour is used again — it doesn’t seem to show much of a seam which is nice. Just have to make sure you hold the old chain behind the new colour so you don’t reach the end of the row & realise you twisted them all up

Still really learning how to decrease the rows towards the end of the hat as I tend to end up with a lot of misshaping — though ideally I’d get the stitch count, find its factors, check row gauge to see how many rows there are until it reaches the centre (at the desired height), and distribute the decreases evenly so the hat doesn’t distort. I did not do that. It shows.

Tried to do a kinda wavy stitch for the top going between SCs & DCs but it didn’t really work — it probably needed more rows and a much better wave pattern (was not a nice stitch count to divide). Not going to redo it as I’ve retried a few stitches for those rows & the yarn has lost its stretch, so I don’t want to redo that again

Update: it has now been adorned with a pompom.