Book Review: The Art of Knitting Hats

Hats are a great canvas on which to try just about any knitting technique. They’re relatively small and quick to knit, and everyone can use a hat, right?

Courtney Flynn shares 30 designs for colorwork hats in her book The Art of Knitting Hats, which is a good place to start if you’ve never knit hats before.

All of the hats are worked from the bottom up in the round and have charted colorwork designs that repeat across the circumference of the hat. They’re all worked in worsted, bulky or super bulky yarns. Sixteen of the patterns are rated easy and the other 14 are intermediate.

The patterns vary from geometrics and chevrons to flowers, trees and seasonal designs like acorns, skulls and hearts. Patterns have either one adult size or one adult and one child size.

Many of the patterns only use two colors, but there are some that use three or more (up to six, though some patterns have options for using more or fewer colors as you like). Some patterns are designed to be worked with multicolored or tonal yarn, while others do better with solids. The author encourages knitters to go their own way with color choices and view each hat as a work of art.

Each pattern includes a section of tips for visualizing your project and getting started, which is helpful if you’re not done a lot of (or any!) colorwork knitting before and you aren’t sure how to pick colors.

For instance the Bonfire patter, which uses a multicolored yarn for the background and a solid color for the flame motif, suggests picking a tonal yarn with red, orange and yellow hues for the background but says you could use cooler colors for a different look. She advises ensuring that your background color doesn’t include any of the color you pick for the design so that it will be easy to see and not bleed into the background.

The book includes an introduction to colorwork knitting including chart reading, yarn management and dealing with floats, so if you’ve never done stranded knitting before this book is a good place to start.

About the book: 176 pages, paperback, 30 patterns. Published 022 by Page Street Publishing Co. Suggested retail price $23.99.

The butterfly on this piece — the Owl Butterfly Playmat by Sophie’s Stitches — caught my eye before I even knew what the project was. Now that I’ve give it a closer look I’m still not 100 percent sure what it is meant to be for, but I still love it.

I think it’s maybe to give you a flat surface to roll dice or play cards on, but there are no images of the project in use so I’m just speculating on that. If you know what it is, be sure to let me know!

What it physically is is a worsted weight mat (the sample is worked in cotton) that measures 14 by 24 inches, or 35.5 by 61 cm. The impression I get from the pattern notes and the photos is that you knit the rectangle plain and the butterfly is stitched on after using duplicate stitch, which is provided as a chart.

Of course you could choose to knit some of the colorwork as you go, either using stranded knitting or intarsia techniques, or maybe some of both. It just looks like a lot of duplicate stitch (and it is!) so knowing me if I were making this project I’d probably try to knit some of it instead of stitching it all.

The pattern also suggests that you can knit a second plain mat to sew on the back and cover up all the yarn ends, as well as making the mat thicker and a little more stable. There’s also a photo that shows fabric sewn to the back, which is also a good option if you have some fabric that has a bit of grip.

I like the graphic on this one enough I might just make it as a table pad for our entry way table. You can always make the mat part a different dimension, just make sure you’re centering the image if you do.

You can find this pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Sophie’s Stitches]

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