ALSO AVAILABLE: THE MATCHING ALLELE SOCKS PATTERN
If you purchase both patterns at the same time, you will get a £2.00 discount on the total price. No coupon code needed.

Made using the helix knitting technique, the Allele hat is a deliciously warm and cosy hat, with swirling, flame-like, two-colour cables boiling up its four sides, and a gorgeous, geometric, cross shape over the crown. It’s the perfect meeting of sinuous curves, and bold straight lines.

The cables are created with two different colours, with strands of one colour elegantly looping over strands of the other, but due to the nature of helix knitting, you are only ever working with one colour at a time: judiciously placed slip-stitches do all the hard work for you!

This hat could easily be made with a DK-weight yarn, but I used two colours of fingering-weight, sock yarn, and I held each one double. This gives the fabric of the hat a dense, close texture that works really well for the stitch definition, and really makes those unusual, two-colour cables pop. (To work with my yarns held double, I caked up each skein using a ball winder, and held the end of the yarn from the centre of the cake alongside the end from the outside of the cake, and knitted with them both together. I did this for each colour, throughout the hat.)

What looks complex and difficult, is in fact, surprisingly easy to achieve, and the results are utterly stunning: you’ll be wowing knitters and muggles alike with your finished Allele hat!

The hat comes in three sizes, S (M, L), and you will find that these sizes easily fit heads that are 53cm (58cm, 63cm) in circumference. Note that the twisted rib brim gathers in the fabric a LOT, and although your hat will at first seem small, it will fit. Have faith in the stretch!

I bought one skein of each of two different colours of fingering-weight yarn, and had enough to make this hat, a pair of sibling socks in the Allele Socks pattern, and still had loads left over.