With the kind permission of Wendy Baker, Modern Daily Knitting is pleased to offer the Hampstead Wreath as a free download for your holiday merrymaking.

Wendy and her partner in True Brit Knits, the late Belinda Boaden, originally designed the Hampstead Wreath as a fundraiser for relief for New York City in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy.

The pattern was a hit with knitters; check out the glorious interpretations here on Ravelry.

Here’s what Wendy and Belinda had to say about the pattern when they first published it:

The Hampstead Wreath (a pun on Hampstead Heath, a wide open space in North London) is easy to knit, but stunning. Add in pompoms and there you go. Designed to look a bit twiggy and natural. You could put pine cones on it instead of pompoms or baubles if you wanted a bit more bling.

We didn’t use a Styrofoam ring as some patterns do, we used a 90cm length of pipe lagging available from a hardware shop / plumbers’ merchant as it was handier (and cheaper – 2 metres were £1.50 - ours was approximately 16cm circumference, to fit a 22mm / ¾” water pipe). And duct tape to fasten the lagging together. The lagging is made from expanded polystyrene / styrofoam type-stuff, easy to cut and bend.

The pattern itself is easy to alter for a different sized wreath, just keep trying it around whatever form you have. The pattern is written for knitting flat and seaming around your form but if you are using the pipe lagging and are handy with grafting then you could easily knit it in-the-round, thread it onto the pipe, tape the pipe up and then graft the ends together. We’ve organised the (very simple) cables so that they reverse at the top of the wreath, giving a small swag shape at the top.

Our yarn was fabulous value for money and looks amazing.

3 x 50g balls of Sirdar Big Softie in Moose, shade 326. Actual amount used was 126g / 114m / 124yds, so we’d add on 10% for wastage if you were using a different yarn and say 139g / 126m / 137yds.

We used part balls of Kelly (325), Egg (322) and Chilli (328) for our pompoms, but you could use any oddments you had.

If you want to graft the cast-on and cast-off edges together you’ll need waste yarn for a provisional cast-off, and unless you cable without a cable needle you’ll need a cable needle too. It’s a very simple cable so the instructions are only written, not charted.