make another hat first. a small gray and red striped hat with matching mittens in a soft yarn called royal alpaca. while knitting the hat think about the fact that the four year old child you are making it for will love knowing the yarn for his hat is made from alpacas who wear crowns. plan to mention this when you talk to him. send his mother (your sister) photos of the hat and mittens. send the actual hat and mittens to your own mother to put under the christmas tree because you are not able to be with your family at christmas. be happy that this small child, your nephew, will at least have a soft hat and soft mittens you made just for him.
notice in the days following christmas that the photos your sister sends you show your nephew wearing a raggedy hat and mismatched mittens when he goes outside. worry that you made his new hat and mittens too small but nobody wants to tell you. get a text from your sister saying the child is running loose like a wild, hatless beast because his aunt did not make him anything. insist that you did make a hat. and mittens. direct her attention to the photos you sent her well before christmas showing said hat and said mittens. listen to her accuse her parents, your parents, of neglectfulness. of holiday misdeeds. vow revenge.
call your parents. relate your confusion. listen to both parents insist the hat and mittens were wrapped, opened and even, at one point, tried on by the small child. vow to get to the bottom of this. determine to open up a post office box in the child's name so he can get his own packages directly. attempt, from halfway across the country, to coerce your family into telling you what they've done with the innocent hat and mittens. consider hiring a hostage negotiator. look into psychics. hear dreadful stories concocted by various family members about the likely demise of the knitted things. generally these stories end with "and she probably threw them in the trash with the wrapping paper" or "and she probably never wrapped them to begin with". listen to denials and accusations. consider whether your mother and baby sister might be in some sinister cult that despises wool. vow to overcome.
call the middle sister and plead with her to "take care of things". she is known for a certain ability to persuade and you briefly imagine the middle sister in a dark room with a single light bulb, glaring at your mother and baby sister, both sitting uncomfortably in chairs made of, alternately, very itchy wool and very sweaty, tacky synthetic yarn, confessing to their involvement in various doll deaths, clothing disappearances and neglected phone messages. hope the middle sister will get the truth out of them.
give up on the surfacing of the hat. look on hat-related knitting sites for a new pattern because you are too sad to create your own. find a fish pattern you jokingly send the baby sister. rejoice when she asks if the pattern is too difficult because the small child wants a fish hat. realize that a fish hat will probably allow the small child to more easily communicate with the new fish living in his house in a softly glowing tank. 
call to thank your various family members for losing the original hat and allowing you the opportunity to make a fish hat. try to sound snarky so they will know they are still in a little bit of trouble, but not too much.buy some yarn at your neighborhood yarn store. show the guy at the yarn store the pattern and watch him swoon. begin knitting in your mind on the short walk home. begin knitting for real seconds after you get in the door. shove the dogs off your lap. shove the dogs off the yarn. explain to the dogs that balls of yarn are not dog toys. take soggy yarn out of dog mouth. take soggy yarn out of dog mouth again. explain to dogs that gnawing on bamboo knitting needles is hateful. adjust your knitting so that you are able to knit with a 35 pound spider-legged dog curled up on your lap and a 15 pound stub-legged dog draped around your shoulders. knit knit knit.
take your knitting on the train. show it off to strangers. take it to work. show it off to co-workers. make a fish out of yarn. look at it. enjoy the fact that it looks like a fish. knit some fins onto the fish. flap them. look for googly eyes. feel indignant when you go into stores asking for googly eyes and are met with dead-eyed art-store employees who shrug and point to a wall with tiny googly eyes, far too small for a giant fish hat. find eyes in another local yarn store. rejoice. feel indignant again when the yarn store man at this yarn store is not nearly as excited as you are about finding giant sew-on googly eyes. sew on eyes. look at the hat. it looks even more like a fish. realize it is the first knitting project you've made in more than ten years that actually looks like what you imagined before you started. 