With various friends and family having babies this year, I had an excuse to make more hats. I had a specific request for fruit/vegetable baby hats, and I used that as an excuse to perfect my designs. I really like using KnitPicks Swish and Shine for baby hats, since they’re both machine washable, and they aren’t super expensive. I tried to use these hats as an excuse to use up my stash of swish, but I just found myself ordering some more since I need even more baby hat gifts!
My blueberry is very simple, being just a blue hat with a greenish/brown stem. I was so excited to go blueberry picking right after finishing this hat, in part because I will happily eat blueberries all day, and also because it meant I could take this picture of my blueberry hat on a pile of blueberries.
My apple hats are also fairly straightforward, with really only the addition of a leaf and a stem (with the appropriate coloring, of course). I did try a few different leaf types, playing with the number of yarnovers, and I’m not sure I have a favorite. My least favorite is the yarnovers down the whole length of the leaf, but I still think it works well enough as a hat decoration. For these hats I knit the leaf separately, then sew on the leaf. I try to make sure that it won’t twist around too much by attaching it in two places at the base.
My pumpkin pattern is also fairly simple. Since we don’t typically see pumpkins with leaves I don’t bother trying to make a large pumpkin leaf, but I do some purl columns to get the pumpkin ribs. I’ve decided that the rolled brim just doesn’t work as well with the ribs, since it requires switching between straight knitting and the ribbing. Inevitably when I see these on a kid, the brim is rolled down to the extent that you can see where I’ve switched, which I don’t like.
I spent a bit of effort in perfecting my eggplant hat. I know there are lots of free patterns where the leaves are done as colorwork, but I’m not quite happy with how those turn out for me. I wanted more three dimensional leaves, so I played around with different ways to create little leaf flaps, while leaving the top of the hat solid green. What I settled on as my favorite final result is somewhat complicated, but reduced the transition between the sticking out leaves and the top of the hat. I knit the purple as a tube, and when it comes time to start the decreases I get a new set of needles and do a provisional cast on in green. After one row of straight knitting, I start knitting the leaves. I’ve been doing 5 leaves, and for each leaf I decrease two stitches every right side row until they’re all gone. To join the leaves and the purple tube, I then knit together a green stitch and a purple stitch all the way around. It seems to work better than my first attempt of simply switching to green for the decreases and coming back to pick up stitches and knit leaf flaps.
New for me this summer was knitting rutabaga hats. Every year in Ithaca NY (where I spent several years at grad school) there is the International Rutabaga Curling Championship. As an avid attendees, my partner (note his excellent modeling job) and I determined that his friends needed a whole family of rutabaga hats to celebrate their firstborn. The baby got a simple rolled hem, but I played with a stockinette and ribbed interior hem (not that they’ll really need the extra warmth in central California, but… I like making hats with thick brims to keep ears toasty warm!). It was a bit of a challenge to determine how best to do the stalks on the top, and there were so many ends to sew in! I really like the final results though, and there will probably be more rutabaga hats in my future…
