A retrospective of baby hats

When I starting knitting enthusiastically, about four or five years ago, many of my first projects were baby hats. Baby hats have the combined attractiveness of being a smaller, manageable project, yet have so many possibilities for different stitches, patterns and shapes.

One of the first I made was the Classic Cap pattern from Amanda Keeys Baby Beanies: Happy Hats to Knit for Little Heads.

 My next hat was the Neon Brights pattern from BabyKnits Hats & Booties: 15 Matching Sets for Noggins and Tootsies by Edie Eckman, Bonnie Franz and Debbie Ware.

Followed by the Elf pattern from the same book.

After these hats I decided to explore the worlds of stranded knitting and intarsia!

It was Easter time and I got a bit ambitious for my first project. I decided I wanted to knit a little hat with some Easter chicks on it for my god daughter. After realizing that cross stitch patterns could basically double as knitting patterns, I found a cute little picture that I thought would work for a knitting pattern. I made myself some graph paper and mapped out all the colours to use. Using a basic hat pattern given to me by my husband's aunt, I went to work. As it turns out, while doing stranded knitting, carrying all those colours of yarn behind your work can make for a pretty bulky project!

The results were good, but I decided I needed to do something with fewer colours. My next hat was this cute little train pattern that came with the basic hat pattern from Auntie Marion.

For my next hat, I wanted to do another, more colourful pattern, but wanted to avoid the bulk of all the carried yarn. For my next hat, I used the intarsia technique instead. It worked well, but I had to keep a lot of little balls of yarn around. I wound the yarn onto clothes pins to keep track of it, but I it was a lot of work for a little toque! The elephant pattern came from 1000 Great Knitting Motifs by Luise Roberts.

All of the hats were knit with acrylic yarn from my collection.