First FO of the year!

Since it seems everyone and their dog has a slouchy beret (OK - I may be exaggerating on the dog berets. But given that there are cat sweater patterns out there, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine someone has knit their dog a beret to match their doggie sweater) I used the multi-lot iona yarn to knit a One Day Beret - for my purposes, it is christened The Bandwagon Beret. The pattern is top down, and works for any gauge; so if you are both afraid of running out of yarn and too lazy impatient to knit a swatch, this is the perfect beret pattern. On New Year's eve we were boring and vegged out in front of the TV decided to spend some quality time together. I cast on for the beret at the start of the Canada-US hockey game, and had gotten almost to the point of doing the ribbing by the time we were ready to go to bed. I decided to try it on to see how it was looking: Isn't it funny how you often don't notice stripey pooling as you are knitting, even when it is blindingly obvious if you look at the project in its entirety? Even the monkey perched on my head doesn't distract you from the stripes (I guess this would be a Bellini Beret). Since the nice people at Colinette had so kindly separated my skein of yarn into 2 parts, on New Year's day I frogged it, and re-knit it alternating the 2 yarns: Even though I went down a needle size, my ribbing is pretty loose. Sadly, I suffer from "the first purl stitch after a knit stitch is loose" syndrome; 1x1 ribbing is probably a bad idea because of this. It looks like the ribbing is stretched out, but the beret really just slips on as is. I even did a simple crochet purl-wise cast off to try and tighten things up. Since I would hate for it to blow off in a strong wind, I think I'm going to rip the ribbing back and re-knit it in 2x2 ribbing with an even smaller needle. If worst comes to worst, I'll knit some elastic into the ribbing. The sordid details are: 5 mm needle (4.5 for the ribbing). I knit the top until it was 9 inches diameter(16 stitches between markers), did 2.5 inches of straight stockinette, and 1.5 inches of ribbing(12 stitches between markers). I had 11g of leftover yarn, so it used about 130m. Now if only I could keep up this pace of one FO per day - I could finally make a dent in my stash!