While I was visiting family, young Angus watched me knit. “Will you make me a hat?” Of course. The idea for the design was obvious—Dad is an ex-rugby player from New Zealand and All Blacks the family team—so a logo hat it would be. When I later saw a picture of the team logo. I gulped and dug in.

“Festive knitting,” or stranded intarsia knit in the round, was described by Mary Thomas in her classic Mary Thomas’s Knitting Book and used by Priscilla Gibson Roberts in the “Bulgarian Blooms” sock pattern. The New Zealand silver fern would be perfect! While a little (OK, a lot) fiddly, the benefit of becoming comfortable with this technique is that it allows a knitter to easily add a single motif to a project.

Motif rows are worked in pairs. The first row is regular stranded knitting, but the contrast color is dropped at the end of the motif and the main color is continued over the rest of the round. On the alternate row the contrast yarn is at the left side of the motif and the main color at the right. In this case the main color is worked first. At the end of the motif, the work is turned, and the contrast color stitches are purled back to the start. On each pass, the unworked stitches are slipped purlwise. When working the contrast color, the knitter has the choice of knitting backwards or turning and purling.