Knitting Rules! (22 page)
Authors: Stephanie Pearl–McPhee
One of the best things about hats (and there are many) is the way that one can be knit, spur of the moment, with no pattern and very little planning. If you have yarn and the needles that go with it, you can have a hat.
Ingredients
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Yarn
(your choice)
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Needles
that, when used with your yarn, give you a fabric you like (Use straight or circular, but if you choose to knit in the round you'll need a set of more or less matching double-pointed needles to finish the top of the hat when the stitches won't fit around the circular anymore.)
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A darning needle
for sewing up
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A measuring tape,
if you can find one (where do they go?)
How to Do It
You know what I'm going to say.
Knit a swatch
and find out how many stitches to the inch you're getting with the yarn and needles you have chosen.
Measure around the head
of the recipient, or use the chart Typical Head Sizes (see
page 110
) to make an educated guess.
Multiply the number of inches
around the head by the number of stitches to the inch. For example: If the intended head is 20 inches and you're getting 5 stitches to the inch, then 20 Ã 5 = 100 stitches to start with.
Number of stitches per inch à number of inches around head = number of stitches to cast on.
Cast on
the calculated number if you're knitting in the round or the calculated number plus two stitches (for the seams) if you're going back and forth.
Knit
either around and around or back and forth (or do ribbing, or whatever turns your little crank) until the hat is long enough to reach the crown of the head (see Head Rules and Exceptions on
page 118
).
When you reach the crown,
you have three choices. Which one you opt for has a lot to do with your personality and how close it is to the deadline for the hat.
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Quick and dirty/Christmas Eve solution:
Do nothing. Knit to the top of the head, work an extra inch, then thread the yarn through the working stitches and gather them up tight. Sew the seam (if you have knit flat) and admire the finished hat in a self-congratulatory fashion. This makes a hat with a fetching gathered top and works best if you've used yarn that isn't too bulky, although if I'm really anxious to finish a hat, I can rationalize it any way I need to.
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A little more time and effort:
For the next round (or row), knit two stitches together every three or four stitches. Work one row plain, then work one row with a decrease every other stitch. Work another row plain, and on the last row (or round ⦠you know what I mean), knit two stitches together all the way across. Gather up the remaining stitches (triumphantly), and you're done.
When in doubt, knit longer. A hat that's too long can be folded up, but a hat that's too short will be annoyingly tugged on for years to come.
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Type A solution:
Count your stitches. Choose a number between 5 and 10 that divides into your total. For example, if you have 80 stitches in your hat, 8 is a good choice. Now work a row decreasing in groups of eight (or whatever your number is): Knit six; knit two together. See how that's eight? (Six knit stitches plus two knit together. Eight.) ⦠All the way across. Work the next row plain (with no decreases), then, on the next row, make the group of stitches one less: Knit five; knit two together. Work a row plain, then, knit four, knit two together, and so on.
Carry on in this ever-diminishing way, alternating a row of decreases with a row of plain knitting, until you are knitting two stitches together all the way across the row. Gather up the remaining stitches and admire the way the decreases spiral elegantly around the crown of the hat.
If you want (for reasons I shudder to imagine) to make a pointy hat, just work more plain rounds between the decreasing rounds. Conversely, if you have accidentally knit a very pointy hat (which is more likely), you need fewer plain rounds to level it off.
Head sizes can be deceptive. If it's a baby head, it's a lot bigger than you think. While an adult's head is one seventh of his total body height, a baby's head is (disconcertingly) one-quarter of the total height, meaning that the proportions both around the head and from the cast-on to the crown, are more than you think. Until you have a heap of experience knitting hats (and I suggest even then), measure both the head (bigger than you think) and the knitting (smaller than you think) â often. It's hard to “eyeball” something round.
Head Rules and Exceptions
Head/hand height.
The distance from the base of a person's palm to the tip of the longest finger is equal to the height of a hat (for that particular person's head) from cast-on edge (when placed just above the eyes) to the point where you begin decreasing (to shape the crown). This means that all you have to do to make a hat the right height is to lay the hand of the recipient on the knitting as the work progresses. When the knitting matches the hand height, it's time to decrease. This is a good trick to know at Christmas, when you can go around measuring hands instead of hats and make people think that they're getting mittens. (As interesting as knitting is to us, it tends to rate low in the intrigue department for non-knitters. Explaining this trick may be the best knitting moment you have all year.)
This rule doesn't not work for children under six years old (see box on
page 110
). And, if you don't have hands,
well, handy, and you can't measure your victim, here's a rough guide to the distance to knit from cast-on to crown:
Baby | 5"/13 cm |
Toddler | 5½"/14 cm |
Child | 6"/15 cm |
Small adult | 6½â7½"/16â19 cm |
Large adult | 7½â8½"/19â22 cm |
Variation 1
Rolled Brim
: Simply subtract a few stitches from your starting number (maybe one inch worth) and start knitting in stockinette stitch (knitting every row). By putting a fewer stitches in the “roll” part of a roll, it will look better and stay on better. (It's still no match for a fast-moving anti-hat toddler, but it's a start.)
The beauty of the rolled-brim hat is that doing nothing actually creates a style. Most of the time you're just killing yourself for a seriously funky style, and the genius of the rolled-brim hat is that all you do is knit without thinking and whammo â it's a brim. The stockinette fabric will curl up as you go. Give yourself a little pat on the back; this curling is exactly the effect you're going for. When you have done an inch or two, add back the stitches you took away and carry on as for a standard-issue hat (following the No-Pattern Hat above).
If you're doing a rolled brim or a rolled hem or a rolled whatever, remember to let it roll while you measure for length. It sounds obvious, but instinct tells you to uncurl it the way you would to measure anything else accurately. If you don't measure it “curled,” the finished piece will be annoyingly short and dorky.