This started because I wanted to draw lines on my knitting. And there are actually a bunch of ways to do that! But one of my very favorite is to hold a floofy yarn alongside a regular yarn and then occasionally set the regular yarn aside and work with just the floofy yarn. When you do that, the stitches made with just the floofy yarn end up being a different color. And if you stack them up, you get a line. And once you’ve got the hang of that, well, there’s no end to what you can do.

Here I went with drawing wibbly wobbly swoopy lines. They’re pretty and easy to memorize, and they make the fabric just the tiniest bit wavy, and I swear I couldn’t love them more if I tried. Combine that with a turned hem, which I maintain is the tidiest way to start a hat, and an adorable little welt, and you end up with something that is astonishingly warm and the perfect mix of tidy and swoopy and really just generally delightful all around.

Plus you get to draw lines on your knitting. Which is apparently enough to keep me amused for hours at a time. And possibly I shouldn’t admit that in public? But I suspect some of you might just share this particular fascination, so maybe if we all pretend that’s perfectly normal we can get away with it!

General information

This 30-page pattern sneaks a whole bunch of nifty techniques into what looks like a simple little hat. You’ll start with a turned hem (one of my very favorite ways to start a hat), then work a welt (optional, but damn cute), then you’ll do some nifty yarn manipulation tricks to draw wavy lines all over your knitting. There are dozens of step-by-step photos to show you exactly how to do all that, and when you’re done, you’ll have a hat that’s both unspeakably cozy and delightfully tidy.

Skills & scope

So there is a lot going on here (turned hem, welt, pretty little lines)…but the knitting itself is shockingly simple. It’s almost all stockinette worked in the round, just with a couple of decreases here and there to move those lines around. It’s one of those patterns that’s delightfully intuitive once you catch the rhythm of it but still somehow looks unreasonably impressive when you’re done!

The pattern uses charts, so you will need to know how to follow a knitting chart.

Yarn, gauge & sizing

The hat comes in four sizes (from a 104 stitch cast on to a 128 stitch cast on) and is written for five gauges (from five to seven stitches per inch in half stitch increments).

That means you can use just about any weight of yarn from fingering up through worsted, and there will be a size to fit pretty much anyone’s head. Basically anything that will give you a fabric with a drape you like somewhere in that range of gauges will work.

The hat in the pictures took about 225 yards of DK-weight yarn and about the same amount of a silk and alpaca lace weight. You can either use two different colors (one for the brim, one for the body) or one color for the whole thing. If you use two colors, you want them to be about the same weight, and you’ll use about 1/4 of your yardage for the brim, 3/4 for the body. If you’re making a larger size or using thinner yarn, you might want more like 300 yards of each yarn.

Tools & supplies

You’ll need needles that let you work in the round (circulars or DPNs) in whatever size lets you get a solid fabric with your chosen yarn plus the general knitting tools you need for most projects (scissors to cut your yarn, a darning needle to weave in ends, the occasional stitch marker, a yard or so of scrap yarn).