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.

Lots of craft designers are understandably frustrated about the proliferation of AI “designed” patterns and photos of projects that have no basis in reality. People who don’t know how to tell if a project is AI are often also frustrated when they see a picture for something but there’s no pattern because it’s not real, or they buy a pattern that doesn’t actually explain how to make the thing or ends up looking totally different from the picture.

Some designers have taken it upon themselves to try to make some of those AI patterns that we see online, often with hilarious results.

Katherine Foster was inspired by a famous AI elephant to make what she calls “AIlephant,” which is now a free knitting pattern on Ravelry.

Her prototype uses worsted weight yarn, but you can use whatever yarn you like to make different sizes of elephants.

The elephant features a cable running down the trunk and a different cable pattern on the back. It’s worked in pieces that are joined and stuffed as you go. It uses German short row shaping on the body and includes written instructions as well as a chart for the cable patterns.

Reading through the pattern, it sounds a little fiddly, which makes sense because it was designed to look like a pattern that isn’t real. But it’s doable, as evidenced by the handful of projects you can find on Ravelry. The ears on her version aren’t quite as big and round or maybe don’t sit in quite the same place as the AI version (which if you haven’t seen it there’s a photo of that on the projects page, too). But it’s a pretty honest replica of a dishonest photo, and a really cute elephant in its own right.

If you make this one I would love to hear about it!

You can grab the free pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Katherine Foster]

Have you read?