Felting fail?

The Hermione hat is finished, and was a moderate fail. As per usual, I encountered any number of disasters while making it. Hopefully I'm not the only knitter who this happens to...

The first problem was my inability to read patterns. As Ashley can attest to, even things like K1,P1 are hard for me to grasp....So there I was, cast on and ribbing away, when I decided to recount my stitches for fun. The pattern called for 82, but I was going to do 84 to make it a multiple of 4. To my delight (...) I discovered that I had only cast on 74 stitches (???). But since I had already knit an inch or so, it (for some reason) didn't make sense to start over, so I kept going. I wonder if anyone can guess what happened? Yes! My hat was too small!!!  Classic Jen. Actually, I could have dealt with it being the circumference it was, but the real problem was that it was more like a beanie than a beret. I knit the full 5" the pattern called for, and was disappointed. This is what it looked like when I was done:

So all in all, it was alright, but more beanie-ish than I wanted. Next, I decided to felt without fear, since I didn't feel particularly attached to the hat. I put it in a hot wash and set the timer for 5 minutes. At some point, a fuse blew, and the wash stopped, but I'm not really sure when...so the timing kind of went out the window. It wasn't felted at all the first time I checked it. When I went back down a few minutes later it looked like Super Felted Man, the superhero of speedy felting had arrived....my hat was WAY felted. And bonus, it has shrunk. Disaster! Hahaha...so now my hat was doubly as small as I had hoped, and so felted you could barely see the lovely pattern I had worked. Le sigh. Here it is on my makeshift hat blocking set up (aka a towel stuffed inside the hat):

Things I would do differently next time:

• Don't use smaller needles than the pattern calls for
• Cast on 80 stitches instead of 74
• Knit for at least 6-6.5" instead of the 5" called for
• Don't overfelt...check more often...don't have power go off when felting

I would definitely re-make this hat. It's such a nice texture when it's felted, and I can imagine it would be very warm. When my long of list of things to knit has dwindled, I will be revising this pattern. 

Peace out.