So I know that yesterday I was talking all about Spring, but I still wanted to share this knit fair isle heart hat with you. The weather is chilly here again anyways, so it’s not totally out of season. But this will probably be my last winter knit/crochet item I’ll share for a while.
To start out, here is the graph for the hat (which you can also get in PDF form here). Keep in mind this graph does not include the brim of the hat, or the top of the hat when the pattern ends. Also this pattern repeats five times (which will give you a totally of 80 stitches). This hat ended up being a little more of a slouchy hat as opposed to a beanie, but it still fit Autumn well.
Materials for Knit fair isle heart hat
- two colors of yarn (one skein of each color should do it, I used a worchested )
- knitting needles (4.5 mm)
- stitch markers
I actually did take a few pictures of the steps making the hat, so I figured I’d share them here with you!
Step one: make the brim
Cast on 80 stitches, then do a ribbing stitch of your choosing. Be sure to put a stitch marker at the start so you know where you began. For my ribbing stitch I knit two, then purl two. I did this for 11 rows. If you want the brim of the hat to fold up, you’ll want to do 20 plus rows.
Step two: adding the new color
After you finish the ribbing, do one row of knit stitch in your main color. Now it’s time to use the graph. So knit 8 stitches of your main color, then, on the 9th stitch, knit the secondary color. To do this insert your needle like you normally do, but instead of pulling up the main color, pull up the secondary one.
Step three: watch your floats
Now comes a kinda tricky part. You will need to watch your floats, which is where the color of yarn not being used is “floated” across the back or your work. In the first fair isle hat I made I did not do this, and it ended up not being stretchy enough for Annabelle, so it became Aubrie’s hat. So in the pictures below I have tried to show how it works.
First insert your needle for the knit stitch. Make sure the work yarn is over the secondary color like shown above.
Then knit the stitch using the main color. I hope you can see that the non-working yarn (the secondary color) is “trapped” under a stitch. You also want to make sure the stitches on your right hand needle are stretched out slightly between where you used the secondary color, and where you trapped the float.
Step four: continue around
Continue working the pattern. I found it easier to place stitch markers at the beginning of each time the pattern repeats. For example, I have one at the beginning, then another one after stitch 16, the next one after stitch 32 and so on.
Step 5: finish up the top of the hat and add a pom pom
So I didn’t take any pictures of this part really, sorry. Once you finish row 25, you need to start decreasing your stitches. To do this you need to knit two together after each stitch marker. At some point in time you will probably need to transfer your work to double pointed needles. I like this video a lot that shows how to do it. After you’ve finished add a pompom and you are done! 🙂