Knitting

Free Patterns, Tutorials and Project Ideas

Free Halloween Pattern: Where’s Waldo Hats

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wheres waldo hatsIt doesn’t seem possible that it should be time to start thinking about Halloween, but if you want to knit all or part of your costume or decor, it really is time to get cracking. I’ll be trying to bring you some great ideas every couple of days through the month of September, and more often as the holiday approaches.

Let’s start with the cute Where’s Waldo? knit hats from String or Nothing. (That’s a link to the pattern page; the actual pattern is here as a PDF.)

These red and white striped hats are a quick and easy addition to a Waldo costume. Just pair them with red and white shirts and round black glasses.

The pattern is sized for teens and adults, but smaller yarn and needles could make it kid-sized so your whole family can be a bunch of Waldos for Halloween.

[Photo by Kelley via String or Nothing.]

Looking for more Halloween Knitting patterns? Check these out on Etsy.

Comments

  1. Thanks for the mention! My site, http://String-or-Nothing.com also hosts another free pattern that might please: kids’ knitted “chain mail” – a coif and a hauberk (hood and vest) made from heavy cotton twine from the hardware store, and dyed grey. Outfit that little knight of yours!

Have you read?

Knit a Leopard Print Shawl and Learn about Yarn Substitution

When I was looking around for free knitting patterns to share recently, I came across this fun leopard print wrap from Yarnspirations. 

This fun bulky wrap gives you tons of practice with instarsia and makes a bold statement while keeping you warm. It’s rated for intermediate knitters and the design is charted but pretty easy to follow. And it’s only 50 rows and worked in bulky yarn, so it wouldn’t even take that long to knit. (You can grab the free pattern from Yarnspirations.)

So what’s the problem? The yarn that the pattern calls for has been discontinued, and it’s not a yarn that a substitute for immediately springs to mind. 

The original yarn was Patons Alpaca Blend, a single ply bulky yarn that was a combination of acrylic, superwash wool, nylon and alpaca. 

My first thought was Lion Brand Hue + Me, which is an acrylic and wool blend, with two plies instead of a single. It looks like it has the colors you would need to make this fun shawl. 

But as I was thinking about it, I thought this would be a good opportunity to introduce you to YarnSub if you don’t already know about it. This website is a giant database of yarn that can consider the qualities of the yarn you want to substitute and offer potential substitutions. 

It’s not only thinking about yarn weight, like I was, but also fiber content, number of plies, gauge and even the difference in yardage between one ball and another. It even looks at the price and can be filtered by your price range or preferences about fiber content (if, say, you’re sensitive or allergic to wool, for example, or don’t want to you acrylic). 

When I plugged in Alpaca Blend, it gave me a lot of different options, though many of them were self-striping or multicolored, which wouldn’t work for this project, and I don’t see a way to filter for solid colors only. 

Still, it’s a good tool to give you some ideas you might not know about or might have forgotten about, and it tells you how the new yarn is similar to the old one and how it differs, allowing you to make smarter choices when substituting yarns. 

[Photo: Yarnspirations]