This pattern is retired and not usually available. However, I make many of my retired patterns available for a few days twice a year, and this is one of those times! It will be available from now through some time on Monday, December 2. Then it will go away again.

In the summer of 2022, I realized that I found maintaining a back catalog of hundreds of patterns overwhelming. I couldn’t do it and still release new things. So I took my old patterns down so I could keep doing new work.

A few favorites have come back, and lots of new things have come out! But the vast majority of the old patterns are retired and are no longer generally available.

However, enough folks have asked about old favorites that I make many of the retired patterns available for a few days twice a year (usually in early summer and around Thanksgiving).

• If you see the buy buttons on this page, you’ve caught it on one of the days it’s available!
• If you don’t see the buy buttons on this page, then it’s not currently available.
• If you want to hear when the retired patterns are available, subscribe to the mailing list or patreon, or keep an eye on my instagram.

This is a companion to Entrapment and Misprision (the purple and pink hats in the pictures at the bottom of this page).

Collusion noun secret cooperation especially for a deceitful purpose

So you know slipped stitches? That super easy thing where you just slide a stitch over to the other needle without really doing anything to it? Well this hat is what happens when you decide to take that idea and see how far you can take it!

Everything here is either plain old stockinette worked in the round, or slipped stitches! Well ok, I guess you do a tiny handful of decreases at the top of the hat to finish things off…but all that lovely latticework is made with cleverly slipped stitches. This really is just a tube of stockinette with some lovely fancy bits laid on top.

It’s perfect for when you need something mellow (or you want that deeply satisfying experience of doing something that looks tricky but is really a piece of cake). And it’s an absolutely marvelous thing to do with some wild variegated yarn you can’t quite find a project for…pair it with something more mellow for the main color and watch it shine!

The hat is written in five sizes (castons of 96, 100, 104, 108, and 112 stitches), and you should feel free to adjust your gauge a bit to fine tune the fit of the hat. Just be sure that you’re working at a gauge that gives you a fabric you like with your chosen yarn (you want something dense enough that you don’t see the contrasting yarn behind your fabric).

I recommend working at something around 4.5, 5, 5.5, or 6 stitches per inch, and I’ve included a table to help you figure out what gauge you’ll want to use for your size. With that range of sizes and gauges, the hat will fit a head between 17.5 and 25.5 inches (with lots of points in between).

Oh, and just to help you plan, I used about 150 yards of the gray and 75 yards of the blue yarn to make a hat for a large adult. If you’re making a bigger or taller hat (or if you use a skinnier yarn), you might want more like 200 yards of the main color and 100 yards of the contrast yarn.

This is perfect for you if:

• You want to try something clever and new…but not hard
• You have some extra bits of fancy yarn you’re looking to show off
• You can’t help wondering how that would look as a cowl (there might just be secret cowl instructions hidden away in there)

It’s not for you if:

• You don’t like charts (the pattern uses charts)
• You hate swatching (you need to swatch to check your needle size)