I did, however, finally finish my hat so I can tell you about it! Once you have finished your final round for the leaves, you are done with the red yarn, and the decreases are worked using only the green yarn. Cut a short tail off of the red yarn (maybe 2 to 3 inches), and leave it hanging inside the hat. Start round 31 in the pattern with your green yarn. You've already done some k2tog's if you did the earflaps, but here's a refresher video:
http://www.knittinghelp.com/videos/decreases
You can choose to do either the k2tog on the left at the top, or the ssk on the right at the top. I tried it both ways and it didn't look too terribly different. Follow the pattern until you have 9 stitches left. You are then going to knit those stitches for six rows, forming the stem. Then, the final row consists of k2tog 4 times, and then knitting the last stitch. You'll have five stitches left, and you will need to cut a tail and thread your tapestry needle with that tail. Then you need to draw the yarn through the last five stitches, and pull them closed. I then put the needle down through the center of the stitches (or as close as I could get), and pulling the stem inside out, tied a knot to secure the yarn, and wove the end in a bit. To weave in all of your ends, I basically just thread the ends on my needle, and then pull them through some of the purl bumps going in one direction, and then I come back through a few bumps in the other direction. There are lots of videos on youtube if you are interested in seeing how other people weave in their ends. Here is what my hat looked like before weaving in the ends or adding straps:
Once you are done weaving in your ends, you can add straps to your hat in a couple of different ways. I knit what is called an Icord, and a video to show you how to do that is here. You'll have to scroll down until you find the video, it's close to the bottom. The Icord is a knitted tube. To do mine, I picked up three stitches at the bottom of my earflap like so:
I then started knitting the icord off of these three stitches. You can also pick up a few stitches and knit back and forth, creating a flat strap with the purl bumps on both sides of it. Another option is to pull one long length of yarn through each of these three stitches, and then braid them together to create braided straps. Or, you can leave straps off altogether.
You can then embellish your hat by adding seeds if you would like, using the duplicate stitch. Take your black yarn, and duplicate the v's made by various knit stitches wherever you would like seeds to be. I chose not to do this once I finished my hat. After this, you are done! Here is a picture of my finished hat:
It would be nice if I had something other than a glass to model the hat, but times are tough and we have to use what we have!
That's it for this knitalong. I would love to see pictures, you can email them to me at alexandyjATgmailDOTcom. Is there something in particular you would like to knit or sew next? I will try to be better about timely posts in the future, so let me know what you are interested in doing. I hope you enjoyed doing this knitalong!
