Knitting
a Top This! hat
Glenna Harris
Christmas is almost at our door. Although it's
a great plan to knit holiday gifts all year long,
there's always a person that pops on my Christmas list at the last minute! I'm actually not
usually one of those people who plans to knit
Christmas gifts starting January, but I always try
to do better each year! Socks and hats come
to mind for small gifts for loved ones, and the
Top This! hat is the perfect knitted gift if you
have children on your holiday list.
If you're a relatively new knitterm hats are an
ideal project to help build up some knitting
skills beyond the basic knit and purl. Knitting
a hat will help you practice not just casting on
and knitting, but knitting in the round and knitting some basic decreases. These are all great
building blocks for bigger projects. These kits
are made with self-striping yarn, which
changes color as you knit it – so, even
though there are stripes in these hats,
you never have to stop and change yarn
par t way through.
Children’s hats like these are also often smaller than adult projects, so you can finish them
faster and feel satisfied. One of these hats took
me only 2-3 episodes of Miss Fisher’s Murder
Mysteries on Netflix – it’s hard to beat that!
22
KNITmuch | issue 1
These kits have completely charmed me, I confess, and I’m already making a list of the little
folks in my life who will be receiving them as
gifts. They come with enough yarn for a hat
as well as a little topper shaped like a little
animal or fun toy.
We’ll walk through the steps to make one, using
the grey and pink kitty, and the handsome green
and yellow elephant.
The first step of embarking on any knitting project is to check that you’ve got the right knitting
needles to work with. If you’re working with a
brand new yarn, the best thing to do is check the
label first. All commercially available yarn labels
(or “ball bands”) will have a wealth of information
on them, including recommended needle size,
the fiber content (materials that the yarn is made
of), and washing instructions. In this case, the
yarn label also contains the hat pattern, on the
inside.
We can see from the fine print here that this
project requires 5.5mm/US #9 needles. Reading
ahead in the pattern instructions inside, we can
find out that these are recommended to be a
16''/40cm circular needle as well as double-pointed needles. Other things we’ll need for this project are things you'll often need on hand almost
all the time as a knitter, are stitch markers, yarn
needles for sewing in ends when it’s all finished,
and a row counter is optional if you like some help
tracking how many rounds or rows you’ve knitted.