Knitted Cable Hats

Happy February!  January was just a big disappointment around here — if you’ve been around here for a long time, you know that I’m a snow lover and we’ve barely had any of the pretty white stuff.  ;-(  Oh well, that hasn’t kept me from knitting, and I made some little cabled hats for SweetiePie and our cute little granddaughters.   I posted them the other day on Instagram and I wanted to post all the details here, so I’ll have a record, in case I ever need to make any more.

I made 4 different sizes, so I’ll call them Adult, Child, Toddler and Infant.  The yarn is Big Bad Wool Pea Weepaca which I purchased at my LYS, Knitting Off Broadway.  It’s a fingering weight really soft yarn and it’s fun to knit with.  The entire hats are knitted by holding two strands together and, in order to get the variegated look, rather than a hard stripe, the colors are mixed for a few transition rows when the colors change.

The pattern is a set of free patterns that I found on the internet at crazyhands.net.  The Adult hat is here, the child hat is here and the baby hat is here.  I made the toddler hat first (which is why there isn’t much white yarn at the top, it was a learning experience.)  I used  the child hat pattern and got the hang of the repeats of the cables, etc.  There’s also an option for a folded brim, but I opted for not folding the brim as I was worried that I would run out of yarn.  I originally thought that this first hat would be for the child hat, but it turned out to be just a teeny bit short for FinallyAGirl, so I added ear flaps to make it the toddler hat for FinallyAnotherGirl.  The Adult and baby patterns are a little different, so, I mainly just used them as a guide for sizing, but reverted to using the child pattern when it came to knitting the repeats on the cables.  The child pattern is really nice and detailed — there are some good pictures showing how to do increases and the cables.  Anyway, for my notes, here’s how many stitches/cable repeats that I did for each hat:

Adult: Cast on 112 stitches, increasing to 132 after the ribbing; two cable repeats before starting the decrease rounds
Child: Cast on 112 stitches, increasing to 120 after the ribbing; two cable repeats before starting the decrease rounds
Toddler: Cast on 100 stitches, increasing to 120 after the ribbing; one and a half cable repeats before starting the decrease rounds
Baby: Cast on 80 stitches, increasing to 96 after the ribbing; one cable repeat before starting the decrease rounds

I wanted to have fun with the pompoms, so, rather than make them out of yarn, I opted for the little fur pompoms that you see all over now.  The Adult pompom is a Big Bad Wool pompom that I purchased at my LYS.  Unfortunately, I’ve lost the tags on the children’s pompoms, so I don’t know who makes them, but I purchased them from Blazing Needles.  I was going to buy all three pompoms in the same size, but, luckily for the hats, they only had two pompoms in the larger size, but they had that little teeny size.  I’m so happy they didn’t have three pompoms in the same size — I love that little infant hat!  All of the pompoms have snaps that are so cool — it makes it easy to attach the pompom to the hat AND you can buy pompoms in different colors and then just swap them out in a snap!

Here’s a picture of the two older girls out playing in the snow. This was FinallyAnotherGirl’s first experience to really play in the snow and she loved it! I hope we’ll have a few more snowstorms yet this winter so the girls can have some fun — and get a little more use out of their new hats!

XOXO,
Anna