Today, we’re discussing this fun variation for a knit hat crown. It’s so simple and looks so nice and we’re using the decrease stitches we talked about in this post.
You may wish to add some fair isle in the body of your hat, like the inspiration on My Pinterest Board.
Keep in mind, the focus of your hat is going to be the crown, and it works best on a simple stockinette crown. I attempted working it on a knit 3, purl 2, pattern around and it looked terrible and I had to redo it. You’ll see the original in the video below.
Placing Markers
When you reach your desired hat length, you’ll place a marker at the end of the row. Then take 3 more markers and place them evenly around the row. I used 70 stitches for my hat, with medium weight yarn, and 5mm knitting needles. So I placed my markers at 17, 35, and 52 stitches from the original marker.
Tip: Use a different colour, or style for the marker at the beginning/end of the row. So you can tell the end of the row, from the middle. Try these stitch markers I got from Amazon and they have all different colours and are the removeable kind, so you can use them for crochet as well.
So, now that your stitch markers are on, you’re going to begin working decrease stitches on the first row. You will be decreasing both before and after your stitch markers, see below.
Knitting the first row
Beginning after the first marker, make a slip, slip, purl k, by slipping the first stitch to your right needle like you were going to knit it, but don’t.
Then slip the second stitch to the right needle, like a purl stitch, but don’t purl it.
Now, insert your left needle back through the front of both of those stitches and knit them together. This is an sspk.
Knit across to 2 stitches before the next stitch marker, knit those 2 stitches together (k2tog).
Then slip your marker, and repeat the above stitch, sspk, slip knitwise, slip purlwise, then knit them together with the right needle through the back of the loops. Repeat this paragraph 2 more times, to the end of the row, and finally knit the last 2 stitches together.
Knit the next row without any decreases.
Make another decrease row, following the same as above, working the 2 decreases on either side of your stitch markers.
Repeat these 2 rows until you have around 15 stitches or so left on your needles. I will usually cut my yarn and sew each stitch with my yarn needle then cinch it down to close the top. pass your yarn needle through to the inside and weave in your ends!
Purple Rose Crafts
Keep in mind, you’ll need to transfer your stitches down to double pointed needles when the round ones get too tight.
Also, if you want to have a ponytail or messy bun style, you’ll want to stop decreasing when you have around 30 stitches or so, and cast off, using a stretchy cast off like we did in this post.
As promised here is the video that goes with the above tutorial!
As always, please tag us in any of your makes from our tutorials on Instagram! We love sharing them to our stories!
Thanks so much for learning with me!
