Knit in bulky-weight yarn (shown here in hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn that a friend sent me — isn’t she nice?) with size 9 US (5.5mm) circular needles, the Leafalicious hat is knit in the round from the top down. You’ll use interesting stitches like Judy’s Magic Cast On, LRinc, kfb, seed stitch, and a lace repeat. But with the bulky yarn, it still ends up being a fairly quick knit.
I had a blast watching the colours move in zig zags through the Leafalicious stitch pattern, and I can only imagine how cool this would look in a fall colourway to really imitate the changing of the seasons. If you knit one up, be sure to send me a picture or post it on Ravelry where I can see it! 🙂
You’ll need two size 9 US circular needles, stitch markers, and one skein of a fabulous bulky yarn. The pattern is available for $5 as a Ravelry download, or by clicking the link below. Watch for the matching Leafalicious Mitten/Fingerless Mitten Pattern, which is almost ready for publication.
Happy knitting!
Leafalicious on my kitchen tableLeafalicious -- back & top view
Leafalicious Hat Leafalicious -- back & top view Leafalicious on my kitchen table Leafalicious Mittens are also in the works!
I’ve just submitted these patterns to Knit Picks as proposals, so if they like them, I’ll be knitting them up in a nice fall Knit Picks yarn and hopefully be getting them published. If they don’t like them… Well, then I’ll just have to publish the pattern myself. Either way, I’m really happy with how the hat turned out, and I’ll even be wearing it myself this winter! (I find it hard to find a hat that doesn’t look slightly silly with my glasses, but this one is holding its own. It’s not forming the dreaded “glasses corners” where the arms and the hat meet. Success!)
Expect a hat, some woolly mittens, and cute little baby sweaters to be appearing in the next couple months — all in this awesome, textural theme.
Also, I’ve been mulling over hats. Fall is coming you know, and it makes me want to knit warm things for my kids. I know how to pick a yarn and some needles and just make a hat from thin air. Do you? Well, you will soon!
(I’ve been knitting with Knit Picks City Tweed DK in Poseidon lately; it’s not too obvious, is it? I just discovered that they’ve replaced Poseidon with Jacquard, though… not that I’m complaining — Jacquard looks like an even more perfect shade of my favourite colour! But I realized I’d better not get too carried away with Poseidon anymore, since I won’t be able to get more.)
(p.s. City Tweed is Lovely with a capital “L” to work with. It’s soft in my hands, makes a beautiful, drapey fabric, and is sure to be warm and cozy once the weather turns crisp. Yay!)
This little cutie is available as a Ravelry download for $3 CAD. Update: It is now available as a Knit Picks IDP pattern download for only $1.99! (But you can still get it through the Ravelry link, too.)
It is knit up using a provisional cast on, a hem turn, and stocking stitch. There is nice, simple shaping to form the knot appendages, and a little grafting right at the end for finishing.
Yarn: fingering weight sock yarn, about 120 yards of it.
Needles: US size 1 (2.25) circulars or dpn’s. (It’s knit in the round. I use two circs for the smaller circumference.)
I had a hat similar to this one for my oldest son, but it was made out of cotton fabric. I’ve since given the hat away, and wanted something similar for my new baby girl this fall, so I came up with this design. There’s just something so adorable about a baby hat with ear-like things on the top. I can’t wait to see how it’ll look on her. (Expect photos to be posted once she’s born!)
Why is it that I sometimes need someone else’s permission to be confident? There it is: the truth about me. I constantly need to either talk myself into being confident, or let someone else do it for me. It doesn’t come naturally. Thank God it can come by outside means!
I am currently reading Elizabeth Zimmermann’s Knitter’s Almanac, and now I know what all the fuss is about when it comes to EZ. It seems like every knitting forum online eventually mentions EZ’s technique for this, or EZ’s pattern for that. Well, this EZ book was the cheapest one on Knit Picks, and it contained the pattern for a sweater that I wanted to knit for the upcoming baby girl, so I bought it. I splurged all of $7.50, and I think it’s the best knitting money I’ve ever spent. (Well, except for maybe that grey merino that is now my favourite cardigan; but I guess that’s a fish, and the book is a fishing rod, to borrow from that old metaphor. You get my point. I hope.)
Said EZ sweater: February baby sweater on two needles (but I did the sleeves in the round because I hate seams.)
Listen to this: “Don’t place unlimited credence in us knitting-instruction-writers, or believe everything in print to be infallible. We do our best, but it may easily be that your best is better than ours. Don’t hesitate to improve on us” (p.102). Isn’t that wonderful? Elizabeth Zimmermann herself, the guru of modern knitting, thinks I can do better. Thinks you can do better.
I admit, this particular book isn’t for beginning knitters. EZ assumes that the reader knows a lot about the basics of knitting, and if I had read it ten years ago, I would have been lost. But, as a baby “unventor” trying to figure things out and make some of my own really great patterns, it’s the perfect book for me.
Here are, for your entertainment and encouragement, some things I have learned while designing:
There is nothing new under the knitting sun. I might come up with some pretty new sweater, but it’s just a combination of basic sweater techniques and basic stitch patterns that already existed. Every baby sweater I looked up on Ravelry for inspiration convinced me of that.
Anyone can design, if they really want to. (If they have really poor taste, their designs might look terrible, but they’ll still be designs!) It just takes a little extra knowledge about the basic workings of things. Oh, and knowing some tips and tricks helps, too. For instance: do you know how to do an edge stitch so your back-and-forth work looks neat and straight at the sides? Simply slip the first stitch as if to purl, then knit the last stitch of every row. That’s it. And you’ll be rewarded with a neat little chain of stitches travelling up the side of your work. That neat little chain, if employed on heel flaps, will also make it easier and neater to pick up your stitches for the instep, especially if you twist them to avoid holes. Now that wasn’t hard, was it?
Math. *sigh* Math skills are quite useful, after all, especially when getting things to be the proper size and planning out pattern spacing. Did you know that you could change any of my preemie patterns to fit an adult simply by re-calculating the gauge? For instance, the Tulip Hat is basically a repeated pattern of ten stitches. Knit out a tiny one, measure it, then measure your own head. Figure out how many more repeats of ten you need to fit yourself, then add that many to the hat. Knit in the pattern until you’re about 2 or 2 1/2 inches from the top of your head, then start decreasing. Ta-da! You’ve just modified a pattern. You’re already part designer.
I was pretty scared of gauge when I first started knitting. I ignored it if I could, to be honest, and frankly I’m lucky that some of my knitted sweaters actually fit their intended owners. But now I know: in designing, gauge is a big deal. It makes everything easier. For instance, if I want a sweater with a 40-inch chest, and my gauge swatch tells me that my yarn knits up at 5 sts/inch, I simply multiply 5 by 40 to find out how many stitches I’ll need in that 40 inches: 200. Now, wasn’t that easy?
EZ mentions in her book that a hat is usually about half the circumference of a sweater, so in my determination to design a sweater for the new baby girl, I decided to knit a test hat. I had picked a couple patterns from a big pattern book I have, and I incorporated them into the hat. Since I wanted to knit the sweater from the top down (because the lace pattern looks better upside down), I started the hat at the top, too. I used that little hat to experiment with how to increase in seed stitch without ruining its effect. I discovered a couple things I would not do on the sweater, and I kept going. When I switched to the lace pattern to see how it would look with the seed stitch, I realized that the lace would pull in the seed stitch and make it pucker. Since I don’t want the bottom of my sweater to be narrower than the top, I now know that I’ll have to increase right before switching from the seed stitch to the lace repeats. All this from a tiny little hat! And not from a useless square of fabric!
Here's my test hat. Sweater to come!
(Amazingly, the hat turned out wearable and even cute. I am even more encouraged to keep experimenting. My sister even wants one in her size, since she “hates hats that hug her head too tightly and likes the bubbly look at the top of this one.”)
So, let me encourage you, as EZ has encouraged me: go for it! Change things, make things up, and unvent to your heart’s content. It’s pretty awesome.
More of the hat. I'm just so pleased with my first real "unvention!"
I first knit a viking hat when one of our twins was in the hospital recovering from bowel surgery. He (and his brother) had been a 27-weeker and was ten months old at the time of that particular surgery. He became really sick afterwards, and his lungs started to fail. My husband and I left our three other kids with their grandparents and spent the weekend at the hospital with Xander.
Sitting in the pediatric ICU is a funny experience. The doctors and nurses are constantly moving, discussing, monitoring, and adjusting. The parents are, well, spectators. Xander was unconscious, so sitting at his bedside was like sitting beside a very cute lamp. You can look at it, but there isn’t really much interaction. So, to pass the time and to feel like I was doing something, I talked my hubby into a trip to *gasp!* Wal-Mart to get some yarn and needles. (I have since learned to love non-acrylic yarn, especially super-wash merino. At the time, I thought washable, cost-effective yarn only came in the plastic variety.)
Xander wearing his viking hat in the PICU
This is the “mighty warrior” hat I came up with. I ended up knitting three of them during his stay in the hospital: one for him, one for a baby beside him, and one as a special request for a nurse’s son. Then I made three more when I got home for each of our other sons.
You might be glad to know that Xander’s lungs recovered, and his bowels are all better now, too. But I’ll be the first to admit that his stay in the PICU was a big learning experience and definitely difficult. The doctors tell us that he almost died that time around. I could tell by their faces that they were pretty concerned. But never have I been so certain that God is for us, not against us. Even in the midst of suffering and uncertainty — especially in the midst of such things — He is a source of comfort and peace. And He is powerful.
I knew that at some point, everybody dies, whether we like it or not. I didn’t really know if it was Xander’s time to die or not. I hoped and prayed it wasn’t, and I feel like God reassured me that at this time, it wasn’t. But I was never 100% certain until the day Xander’s lungs started to clear. In the meantime, I chose to keep trusting God, no matter what, and He became my source of strength and peace in the midst of fear and heartache. And, on the same night that my pastor prayed for him at his bedside and my church called an emergency prayer meeting, Xander’s lungs started to clear. They had been in a self-perpetuating cycle of stress, inflammation, more stress, more inflammation, and so on, until that night, when I believe that God stopped the cycle (since the doctors couldn’t do it) and started to make him well again. He recovered steadily from that night on.
It’s funny, really. We shouldn’t be surprised at such things, since the New Testament is full of healings and even contains the promise that Jesus’ followers will be able to ask God for healing and He will answer. But we doubt. We have so many rationales for why there’s another reason behind such coincidences. But a friend of mine and I have a favourite saying when it looks like things fall into place too well: “Coincidence? I think not.”
~~
I’ll be posting the pattern for Xander’s viking hat eventually, when I have time to sit down and write it out. In the meantime, the pattern for the Viking Preemie Hat is available as a Ravelry download for $3. It involves knitting in the round and just a tiny bit of sewing to attach the horns to the hat. I hope you like it!
This little cutie is knit in Knit Picks Felici Fingering-weight sock yarn in "Rainbow."Here it is again, this time on my hand to show some dimension.
This little preemie hat pattern comes with sizes for a head circumference of 6″(7″,8″,9″,10″,12″). With that variety, you can knit one for practically every week of baby’s time in the NICU. It is written for fingering-weight sock yarn and US size 1 (2.25 mm) needles and is knit in the round. One ball of sock yarn will be enough to knit three to four hats, depending on the sizes you choose.
The picot hem gives it a very store-bought, high-quality feel and will impress everyone who sees it. (We won’t tell them how easy it is to do.) There are complete instructions for creating the picot hem in the pattern, and it’s a great skill to acquire if you haven’t tried it already. It’s one of my favourite new techniques. (Oh, and if you’re worried about sewing, don’t be! There is none involved, and the edge will be as elastic as the knitted fabric.)
The pattern is now available as a free Ravelry download. Click on the link below to download it without being a Ravelry member!
Tulip Preemie HatTulip Preemie Hat knit in Knit Picks Fingering-weight sock yarnTulip Preemie Hat knit in Knit Picks Sport-weight Felici sock yarn
Knit in the round on two size 2.25 mm circular needles (but easily adaptable to four dpn’s) with sport weight Felici from Knitpicks in Picnic, this tiny hat knits up easily in an evening or two. You can make two to four from one ball of yarn, depending on the size you choose.
The pattern is available as a Ravelry download for $3 CAD and includes instructions for knitting sizes Tiny Preemie, Large Preemie, and Newborn in both sport weight and fingering weight yarns.
*Errata*I was just knitting another one of these and realized I do something “special” that I didn’t write in the pattern. At the beginning of each increase/decrease round, I slip the last stitch of the previous round from its needle so it’s beside the first stitch on my starting needle. Then I can do my cdd and have them line up properly. Anytime you have a cdd at the very beginning of your needle, whether it’s at the beginning of the round or not, you must slip the last stitch from the previous needle to the next needle so it can be part of the cdd. You’ll know you need to do this by counting 8 stitches between each set of cdd’s and m1-k1-m1’s. There must be only 8.
I’ve been trying to think of how to describe the NICU for my fellow knitters. So many different words come to mind: scary and unfriendly came first, but they’re not really all that accurate. I must just be out of sorts today.
Sure, when I think back on my own experiences there as a mom, there was definitely some fear and trepidation involved — mostly because there was so much I didn’t understand — but there was also a sense of wonder, thankfulness, and camaraderie.
Have you ever seen a preemie? My goodness, they’re beautiful! Picture thin, delicate skin, tiny little chicken-wing arms and legs, and this funny little wrinkly old-man-like face and neck that melts your heart when they turn their heads. (Body fat sure does make a difference in appearance … As I learned after being pregnant with twins — ugh.) They have tiny little noses, and their fingers are so slender and small that they remind me of inch worms. It’s pretty easy to fit daddy’s wedding band over a preemie wrist or even an ankle.
A little wee 1 pound 11 ounce micro preemie
Sometimes it was scary, not knowing what outcomes we might have with our kids, but mostly (and especially when they weren’t in any danger), I felt privileged to view a stage of development that most parents only experience through a padded, heartburn-filled belly. Sure, there were some downsides, especially when my twins were born at 27 weeks and needed ventilators and other modern miracles of medicine, but I can actually look back fondly on my experiences there. (It’s three years since they were born. I can say that now.)
One of the best things about the NICU, besides the ridiculously small amount of privacy while trying to breastfeed an infant who won’t latch on, was the abundance of knitted preemie hats and quilted preemie blankets floating around. At the time, I took them for granted, but in retrospect, and as a knitter myself, I am awed by how much time and effort some caring people took to do something purely for someone else, with no credit or thanks to themselves. I will never know who knit those little hats, but I still have them years later so I can marvel at how tiny the kids were as infants. They are family keepsakes.
So, as a knitter and a mom of four preemies, I hereby bestow upon myself expert status and offer you my advice:
When you knit for preemies, make the hats beautiful and colourful. The NICU is a drab place, no matter how many teddy-bear wallpaper borders they put up. Add some colour to a family’s day and keepsake box in the form of a preemie hat that makes them say, “OOOOOoooohhhh!!!! It’s so adorable!” in little high-pitched voices. Seriously. They’ll thank you.
Also, when you’re knitting preemie hats, unless you know a micro-preemie, don’t knit as many of the tiniest sizes. Those little bitty micro-preemies are the cutest to knit for because the hats will make you think you’re knitting for a tiny doll, but… well, those tiny ones will likely be stuck wearing slightly weird-looking hospital hats that are specially designed to hold up their CPAP machines. Make some small hats because some small babies have different needs for breathing help (or not), but if you’re going to go crazy making a gezillion tulip hats, make them in the bigger sizes. It’s sad for me as a knitter to admit this, but the hospital can usually use the bigger ones more than the small preemie hats.
One of those funny little CPAP hats
When I knit for preemies, I pray for them and their parents. I want every stitch of that hat to be filled with love. I want my preemie hats to be visually stunning, but I mostly want those parents to know that they’re not alone. Can a viking hat do that? Maybe not immediately. But, once the crazy days of worrying and wondering are over and life has gone back to normal and their little wizened old man has blossomed into a chunky baby who cries and wakes them up at night in their own home, they’ll look back and know that something amazing carried them through that whole roller coaster experience.
Was it a hat? No, it was the love and care that surrounded them. And now I get to be a part of that for someone else. And you do, too! Have fun knowing that you’re knitting with purpose, and send me pictures of your preemie hats.
*Errata*I was just knitting another one of these and realized I do something “special” that I didn’t write in the pattern. At the beginning of each increase/decrease round, I slip the last stitch of the previous round from its needle so it’s beside the first stitch on my starting needle. Then I can do my cdd and have them line up properly. Anytime you have a cdd at the very beginning of your needle, whether it’s at the beginning of the round or not, you must slip the last stitch from the previous needle to the next needle so it can be part of the cdd. You’ll know you need to do this by counting 8 stitches between each set of cdd’s and m1-k1-m1’s. There must be only 8.
