Crown of Thorns Tam

I made this hat this spring, and it's the one that I'm wearing in my profile picture (for now).  So far, all of my dreads fit under it, but I'll probably need to go back to the drawing board for this coming winter.  This fair aisle type tam is made a little more roomy than a classic tam, so that it would fit over my big head with my big hair. It uses a worsted weight yarn, and I believe that I started with size 6 needles and moved up to size 8 after the knit 1 purl1 edge. I'd tell you exactly what yarn that I had used, but when I made it, I didn't realize that I'd ever be sharing the pattern.  Lesson learned, for now it'll have to be sufficient to say that the yarn is a mainstream cheaper brand that I picked up at a big name store, rather than a nice yarn shop....

In time I'm going to figure out the best way to reproduce my charts in a more professional way, but below is the chart I wrote out on graph paper.  The darker squares are what I actually did in this hat, but I've added green for the parts of the pattern that I would change if I ever do this design again.  I felt that the vines on the crown of thorns weren't as clear as I'd like them to be so the green in the chart beefs them up a little.  Work chart A from the bottom up, followed by B, and then A again. For the triangle shaped decreasing chart, begin at the top and work your way down.  You can use whatever method of decrease that you'd like, so long as you make those decreases at the edge of each repeat, in order to keep up with the stitch count.  As you can see, I did my knit one purl one beginning with alternating colors, and if you look closely you'll notice that I added one plain row between each chart. Whenever I knit in only one color, however, I still carried along the alternate color just to keep consistency in the thickness of the hat.  This pattern fits a head with a 23 inch crown measurement.  If your measurements are far off from this, either adjust your needle size or add/decrease stitches to fit (just remember to add or subtract them back to do the charts).

I hope this works for you, but if you have any questions, don't hesitate to click on the word comments below and ask.  I really want to communicate clearly enough to be of help.
 

Crown of Thorns Tam Chart