Goodbye UK - Last Minute Knitting

I was in need of a bit of quiet this afternoon. Just a couple of hours to sit and knit, drink tea and catch up with a couple of my favourite knitting podcasts. It was rather delicious. 

I'm enjoying another skein of Skein Queen's luscious cashmere, this time in the Sage Teal colourway. The colour is slightly richer in the flesh. It is deep tones of teal greens and is knitting up beautifully with fantastic depth of colour. 

Remember my Loch hat? My dear friend took a fancy to it and so this skein is destined to become a Loch hat for her as a thank you for having us to stay before we leave. To be honest, this is something of a challenge - I'm not too sure that I'll get it done in the next 24 hours ... but hey, it's worth a shot?!

Although I'm following the pattern as written, I'm trying a couple of little tricks for the left-slanting decreases and the yarn-overs to make this as perfect as I can.

Woolly gave us a bunch of different left-slanting decreases to try at her workshop and I rather liked the SK (slip next stitch knitwise then replace it to your left needle, turning it backwards. Then knit two stitches together through their back loops). The result is neat with a twisted back stitch, matches the right-leaning decrease (knit two together) rather nicely and is a little speedier than your standard SSK.

When I knit my previous Loch hat I didn't like that the yarn overs were slightly different sizes depending on whether they followed a knit or purl stitch. So this time I'm trying something different. I'm not doing a yarn over by carrying the yarn at all. Instead, I'm letting it form "naturally",  by knitting or purling the next stitch but not moving the yarn from front to back or back to front after the prior (opposite) stitch. This way, I'm left with a length of yarn over the needle to knit into on the next round, but it isn't too long so the resulting hole is neat and even on each side. It's a bit fiddly on the next row where the yarn over occurs after I have changed from a purl to a knit stitch, but I'm getting the hang of it. 

Does that make sense? I'm not sure how coherent I am at the moment. I'm tired!