I am so excited to finally be getting this hat on the blog. No lie, it’s been on the schedule for over two months, but just kept getting pumped back for other timely posts. But now I’m sharing the pattern for the snowfall ombre knit hat, which is the best name I can think of for this. It’s kind of got an ombre look to it, while my intention was also to make it look like falling snow.
Here is what the pattern looks like. Since I find it much easier to read a graph with these types of patterns, I didn’t write it out. You can get a PDF of the pattern here. It’s nothing fancy, but gives you the image below, with some written directions.
**YOU WILL NEED TO REPEAT THE PATTERN ONCE.**
The hat itself is pretty straight forward. It is knit in the round using 4.5mm needles. Begin by casting on 76 stitches (Remember, you need to repeat the pattern once). After casting on be sure to put a stitch marker on your needle. Then, do a ribbing stitch (aka knit two, purl two) for 10 rows, which is not included in the graph. If you like the look of a brim that folds over you can do the ribbing stitch for 20 rows instead.
After the ribbing is done, switch to a knit stitch and follow the pattern.
Once you add the second color you will be floating the color not used in the back. I did not do a stellar job with that with this hat. Since it was my first time using two colors while knitting, you can see that some of my floats are long, as you can see in the photo below. Oops.
After I finished this hat, I did a little research and found that you really shouldn’t let a float get longer than 4-5 stitches. You can see in the example below (from a different hat I am knitting) that I have trapped the white yarn with the purple yarn. This really helps keep the tension not so wonky, which was a slight problem I had in the hat above.
Another important part of doing fair isle (also called stranded color work) is making sure you stretch your stitches out on the needle when you knit a stitch with a new color. Do you see below how the stitches on my right needle are stretched? Keeping them stretched I insert my right needle into the next stitch on the left, yarn over and pull up the new color. If you don’t stretch out the stitches before knitting a new color, then whatever you are making won’t stretch when you are done. In the snowfall ombre hat I made I didn’t do such a great job with stretching the stitches out, and as a result it doesn’t really fit Annabelle, and has become Aubrie’s hat.
Back to the ombre hat. Once you get to row 27 it’s time to start decreasing your hat. To be honest there wasn’t really any rhyme or reason to how I decreased this hat. I’m pretty sure I knit two together, then knit 11 for the first round decrease. Then on the second round I knit two together, knit 10. I continued the pattern until I couldn’t stretch the stitches on the needle, then I cast off leaving a tail and closed the top by weaving the tail in and out of the stitches, similar to how you close an amigurumi piece.
So I know these aren’t the most stellar of directions, but I hope hope they make enough sense.