The good news
Well I was happy to find that all my calculations and knitting matched my schematic perfectly. Yeay! That was the tricky part. After wrapping my brain around determining the slower decrease rate on the decrease side of the diagonal to actually create an increase, I admit I felt a wee bit clever. Heh, nothing like knitting to keep you humble however.

The intended result. (Do please excuse the crap photography, my photographer (Mr. Pieknits) is out of town.)
The bad news
Like I said, the knitting matches the schematic – too bad the schematic was wrong. Doh. It’s so obvious to me now of course, and would’ve been if I had given more than 2 seconds thought to the basic beginning. So what does it actually look like?

Hershey’s Kiss head!
Although I should stop looking at this photo because I’m starting to kinda like it…
Not the result I wanted however. Below is the basic shape of the hat flat. I had taken the measurement of the full width, then the width after all decreases and drew the diagonal lines. I was imagining the ends to fold in and meet in the middle. The reality in 3-d is you fold it in half down the center- and you can see the sloping point that results.

What it needs to be is like this. Again, looking at it now this is embarrassingly obvious.

I hope this yarn rips well.

Thanks for all your input on the Circumnav Cardi! Having a fresh set of eyes is very helpful. Now that that’s moving along- I finally got to jump over to something that’s been gnawing at my brain since January. Remember this green yarn I picked up in Vegas? No? Didn’t think so. Since I got it I have been sketching and calculating things like this.

This image could possibly prove to be a more interesting What do You See? exercise.
Backing up, when I first got this yarn I knew I wanted to do something with it that played with directional stitches. It’s what I usually go to for variegated yarns, I think it shows off the qualities best that way. This yarn however has more Noro-like subtle color transitions so that quickly ruled out small twisted stitch like motifs. I wanted to preserve the thicker striping effect and I started thinking of diagonal stitches. After much swatching this led to deciding to knit the entire piece on the diagonal for a hat.
The easiest route would have been to knit a long rectangle and cinch it shut but I felt this was cheating. Plus I’m not a big fan of puffiness on top of my head. So I calculated the dimensions of a basic in the round, bottom up ribbed hat that was then slit open flat. Using my favorite drawing program I drew a schematic to scale and then rotated it 45 degrees. Viola! Now I could mark off segments to measure and calculate my stitches, thus the odd looking graphic above.
I’ve been so eager to test out my pattern “theory” as I am calling it (as in, I think it’ll work) that the knitting is already almost done.

Ok, so it does look more eel-like than hat-like at the moment but that’s mostly because the ribbing is pulling it in. I won’t know for sure until I seam it if this first go at it worked, but so far wrapping it around my head at intervals seems to indicate it will. *crosses fingers*