Three little hats

Drops Alladin hat in size 2 years, 12/18 months and 1/3 months. I made some adjustments to the larger sizes.

I am not a very prolific knitter. Although I usually have one of more ongoing projects lying around somewhere, I have only managed to complete about a dozen during my lifetime. Not much variation in my output can be seen either, as three of these finished projects are baby/toddler hats based on the same pattern.

This pattern, the “Alladin” hat by Drops Design, is available for free on their website. As I am such a basic knitter, many patterns that I try out for the first time contain a new technique that may or may not confuse me. In this case it took me a little while to wrap my head around the way the decreases are done, which includes slipping a stitch on a cable needle.

The smallest, purple hat is made of baby merino. Using the same yarn, I also knitted a cardigan from a pattern I found on this website (in Dutch). This cardigan was incredibly boring to knit and took much longer than expected, considering it is such a simple model. Luckily, my daughter wore it a lot throughout her first spring/summer/autumn, so all that work wasn’t in vain.

This picture was taken in March when my daughter was just over a year old. Here she is also wearing my old faux fur coat and shoes. I love reuse items I used to wear myself!

The second hat was knitted in size 12/18 months in a blend of natural and synthetic fibres. It seems like this pattern runs a bit small in the larger sizes. As far as I can tell, I am a loose knitter, so when I use the recommended needle size things often turn out a little bigger. In this case, however, the hat was already a bit small on a one-year-old, even though I knitted some extra rows of increases and decreases. This time, I made the hat a bit more pointy.

The pattern I planned to use this time around. It’s from “Stickat för Barn” no. 2 1955. (For people who can read Swedish and like to try it: click on the image to enlarge.)

As I thought knitting the same hat three times seemed a bit unadventurous, this autumn I set out to use a pattern from a vintage Swedish knitting magazine. I tried it out in different yarns, but liked neither the fit, nor the colour combinations. So I reverted to this tried and tested pattern. The best thing about this hat is how tightly it fits around the head, covering ears and forehead without slipping over the eyes. While it doesn’t protect agains the rain or very cold weather, it easily fits beneath the hood of a coat or a snow suit.

The third hat is made of 100% wool yarn that I bought at Netto (a budget supermarket that also has a large non-food section). As my daughter is now almost 22 months old, I knitted the 2 years old size. To make sure that the hat would cover the forehead, I knitted 10 straight rows instead of 8 and 8 rows of decreases and increases instead of 6. As long as it does not end up in the wrong laundry basket, I am pretty sure that this hat is big enough to last all winter!