Knit all the baby hats

At the risk of stating the obvious, there are a large number of knitting patterns available these days – magazines, books, ravelry and blogs; free and for sale.  And more appear every day – I can’t keep up.  The silver lining to this problem is that I never need to knit the same pattern more than once if I don’t want to.  Sometimes I do want to, but that is a topic for another day.  


I often find myself with between 50 and 100 metres of sock wool, as a pair of socks for my delicate feet rarely require even 300 metres.  I collect these oddments, but I don’t enjoy them sitting there, aimlessly.  Instead, I look through my favourite hat patterns and often end up knitting worsted or aran weight patters in the sock wool, and end up with a collection of baby hats.

I really like the folk art inspired Karusellen hat, but it is a bit too cutesy, and not the right shape of hat, for me.  So I cast on the requisite number of stitches, and knit as per the chart.  While knitting I thought the hat was getting too tall, so ideally I would have started the decreases whilst knitting the coourwork chart, but instead I did the decreases fairly speedily.

I then turned my attention to the Coronet pattern, already knit in sock wool, but I repeated the colourwork pattern as I thought a mainly navy hat for a baby was quite heavy.

Finally, I used the Stashbusting Helix Hat pattern.  Again, a worsted weight pattern and again I used sock wool.  I did the first one with 3 yarns, as per the pattern, and for the second version I used 4 yarns and added an extra colour change point. 

This was a great way to use up the oddments that were idling in my stash, and try some patterns that are interesting or appealing, but not necessarily something I want to wear.