Knit a Lacy Hat for Fall

Last year the Washington Post did a story looking at data from Ravelry that revealed that knitters tend to start knitting hats in August and scarves in September. I’m not quite sure I’m ready for either yet, but if you’re the sort of person who wants to start wearing a hat as soon as the tiniest hint of cool is in the air, you might be ready for a hat like this one.

The Saji hat pattern from Yoko Johnston uses DK weight yarn and has lacy patterns to make it even lighter weight and allow more air flow for those days when you want to wear a hat for fashion but it’s still a little warm for having a solid knit hat or a thicker hat on.

It’s worked in the round from the top down and alternates between a lacy rib and an undulating lace pattern that looks kind of like spoons (saji means spoon in Japanese).

The pattern is designed to use a single skein of yarn (142-175 yards, or 130-160 meters) and because it’s worked from the top down you can just keep knitting the brim until you run out of yarn if you like the fold over look.

The hat comes in one size, about 19 inches/48 cm around and 9.5 inches/24 cm tall, but again you can make it longer if you want a slouchier look or to fold over the brim (or both!).

You can find this pattern on Ravelry.

What do you think about the idea of starting to knit hats in August and scarves in September? It’s way too warm most days for either where I live, and even after all these years I’m still terrible at planning ahead with my projects. Maybe you all are better at that than I am?

[Photo: Yoko Johnston]

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]

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