the quest for the perfect fair isle pattern

I've been working on this fair isle hat for over a month now and just couldn't put together a pattern I liked. I'm making the hat to test out the fair isle pattern I'll be using for a sweater I'm making (that's taken a lot of time and money) so I wanted to get it just perfect. I finished the hat tonight with a pattern I really like (YAY!) so I figured in celebration I would share some photos of the process:

This was the beginning of the first pattern I tried. It started out OK, but as I got into the section after this part I realized that it was going to be way too big of a pattern for the front of a sweater.

This is the second pattern I tried - I think I just wasn't paying attention when I designed it because I made the first and third fair isle rows basically the same thing and the second one was extremely similar to them so it was a little boring.

And the winner is....



















I guess the third time really is the charm!