Knit a Snug Hat with the Pentacap Knitting Pattern

Woolly Wormhead is well known for their interesting hat designs, which often use different construction methods or design elements to make a hat that looks a bit different from the usual beanie.

The Pentacap is a free pattern on the Woolly Wormhead website that is worked from the bottom up with a wide garter stitch brim and a braided accent before you work the body in stockinette stitch.

Because it’s worked in the round you have to knit a round and purl a round to make garter stitch, while stockinette is straight knitting, which is kind of a fun twist for your brain.

Once you’ve worked the body, the top is shaped with five decreases, thus the name of the hat.

It’s meant to be snug and close fitting, but there are a range of sizes available so you can knit a slightly larger hat if you don’t like it so snug or if you have a lot of hair that needs to be able to fit underneath the hat.

The sizes are for actual head measurements ranging from 19 to 25 inches, with the hat itself measuring 16 to 22 inches when knit.

It uses worsted weight yarn and requires knowing how to work a crochet cast on, knitting and purling in the round, a bind off braid and the knit 2 together decrease. (The pattern explains how to do the bind off and it looks pretty easy even if you’ve never done something like that before.)

You can get the free pattern from Woolly Wormhead.

Looking for more fun hats to knit? Check out my review of Woolly Wormhead’s book, Knit Hats with Woolly Wormhead. It is full of all sorts of interesting patterns that are sure to turn heads!

[Photo: Woolly Wormhead.]

For the past few years I’ve taken part in a Christmas in July blog hop that encourages people to get a jump on their making for holiday gifts.

I love to use yarn I already have for these projects in the hope that people will consider what they already have that they can use to make projects for themselves or to give as gifts.

This year it was a couple of knit baskets made using partial balls of yarn left in my stash from other projects.

They use the same basic pattern but the first one is made with two colors of bulky yarn, and the second used two strands of worsted weight yarn held together, which made the gauge about the same, but I cast on fewer stitches to make a smaller version.

The bottom of the basket is square, though you can make them rectangular if you’d rather. Then I just knit up the sides in rounds until I was about to run out of yarn. This gave both baskets rather short sides — maybe more like a tray than a basket — but you can keep knitting as long as you like to make the sides of your basket as tall as you want.

They’re worked in seed stitch, which keeps the edges from curling and adds a nice texture to the baskets.

Of course this also allows you to use even more odd balls from your stash. I’d love to make a big one someday combining lots of different yarn. I mean, I’d probably use it to store more yarn, but that’s a fine thing to do.

As it is, these little trays are great for sitting on your desk or bedside table to hold little things that always seem to appear there. I like to use one to hold the supplies for whatever project I’m working on, things like little scissors, my tape measure, a crochet hook, etc.

And they would make good gifts on their own or as a container to hold some other goodies if you like.

You can find the free pattern for these stash busting baskets over at Our Daily Craft.

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