Hat #43 Fish Adult Size

I uploaded a corrected pdf today - I hope it is completely correct now. Thank you to those of you who let me know about errors! I tried to write it to make it a little easier to understand on the short rows. Please make sure you have the latest version. This is an homage to the original Knitty fish hat. So many fabulous projects posted with so many good ideas. I kept coming up with modifications I wanted to make so finally combined all of them into a pattern so I can post it. (You can find the child size version I posted earlier under the pattern name Hat #42 Fish Child Size). Here are a few things I wanted to accomplish with this pattern. - I wanted the beginning of the round to be on the bottom of the fish to help hide any color joins (so the lips had to be reworked to accommodate that). - I wanted the tail and fins to stand out, not flop over (you can even add a little stuffing to the fin and tails on this if you really want them to stand out). - I wanted the tail to be vertical like a fish's tail would be. - I wanted to control how far the lips were able to turn over, which can be hard to do with only stockinette. - I wanted the decreases staggered more towards that tail so that decrease rounds didn't suddenly appear in the sea of stockinette. So - that's why I wrote out the pattern. I'll warn you (as I did on the child size version) that the tail takes a while. It involves short rows in the round (which isn't hard, just a bit fiddly) but does take a while. It'll be fabulous when you're done though! Have fun. Please post projects and pictures.