“Over this past holiday season while searching for a hat to knit for all the nieces and nephews, I got inspired by a striped hat I saw. After a little re-working and spelunking around with the pattern, I began knitting these over and over. Right now, I wish I had one on my needles! The self-striping yarn creates fun changing stripes over the solid foundation. I also played with using two different skeins of self-striping yarn to create strobing stripes. They’ve now gone out to kids all over the country to wear and enjoy! And, I kept one for myself for my morning walks.”

This hat is great for using up scraps of self-striping yarn as it uses about 75 yards of each color.

Instead of using a solid color and self-striping yarn, you can use two self-striping yarns. Make sure to either use highly contrasting colorways (such as a muted colorway and colorful colorway) or start making sure that the stripes will not coincide. A good way to do this is to pull to a point where the stripes are just one to two colors off. For example, if the skeins’ stripes go Red, Yellow, Orange, Blue; then pull the second colorway so it will stripe Orange, Blue, Red, Yellow. That way, the colors won’t overlap and cause muddiness in your stripes.

You can easily re-size this hat. All you need to do is make sure you are working with an even number of stitches so that the stranded brim pattern works.