I love Christmas time! I also love wearing Santa hats. I’m always on the look out for cool looking Santa hats as soon as the season rolls around. I have a big, soft, fluffy one, and one with a black brim and pom pom on top, I even have a cute felt elf hat with a bell on top.
But this year I decided what my collection really needed was my very own knit Santa hat!
I don’t currently knit in the round. Since I am a mostly self taught knitter, I’m still aquiring skills, I can do quite a lot with straight needles but double points and circulars are not something I’m familiar with. Unfortunately, literally every Santa or elf hat pattern is for double point or circular needles. I’ve mastered the beanie on straight needles but I wasn’t exactly sure how to get the cone shape.
I looked up some patterns and tried to figure out if I could adapt them for straight needles. I found one pattern that looked like it had a straight needle option and kinda skimmed it. And by skimmed it, I mean didn’t pay a lot of attention to what it was saying.
So I got started on a hat and tried doing what I thought this pattern was telling me to do, which was to knit for about 5 or 6 inches and then start decreasing one on each end every other row…this did not end up going well…you might even say it was an epic fail. I imagine if a better, more experienced knitter were reading this, they would probably laugh at me.
I am constantly working to improve my knitting skills but I’m not so seasoned that I can always tell how something is going before I finish it. Sometimes things look completely wrong to me right up until I either cast off or sew it up. Anywho, when all was said and done I was left with a hat that looked more like a…well it looked kinda like a mountain with a pointy cliff. This, dear reader, was not the desired result.
So I took a couple pictures of the monstrosity so I could send them to a friend to laugh at and then decided I would try it the way I had originally thought about doing it.
Turns out my way was the right way. I basically made my normal beanie shape but put more rows between the decrease rows and started with fewer decreases which essentially made a nice cone shaped hat!
When the hat came out looking more like a Santa hat should, I made a pom pom for the top, sewed it all together and was quite pleased with the end result.
I’m rather proud of this hat and I have to say, I get comments every year when I wear my Santa hats around town but I’ve gotten more compliments on this particular knit Santa hat than any other Santa hat I’ve ever worn! It’s kind of a nifty conversation starter, people tell me they like it and then asked if it’s home made. So of course I say it is and that I made it and before you know it I’m discussing crafts with complete strangers!
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