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.]

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I don’t even know what to say about this amazing knitting pattern. The Bestiary Scarf from Monstra & Mirabilia is so full of details it’s a little intimidating to talk about.

It features, as the designer describes it, an “artistic encyclopaedia of Western mythical creatures.”

The pattern includes a dragon, harpy, Medusa, chimaera, centauress, phoneix, kraken, mermaid, sew serpent, cyclops, wyvern, Pegasus, amphiptere and amphibaena. (It’s a good thing there’s a photo of the proejct with everything labelled because I definitely didn’t know the names for everything.) It’s also designed like a landscape, with water and land creatures toward the bottom ends and sky creatures toward the top.

The dragon is at the center and is worked sideways so it will show as upright when you wear it.

The scarf is worked in double knitting, so the colorwork appears in the opposite colors on the other side.

It’s worked in light fingering weight yarn (on size 0 US or 2mm knitting needles) and the colorwork is shown in charts. The pattern also includes some video tutorials and written instructions to help you along. The designer says the pattern is for intermediate knitters, and “advanced beginners may succeed with patience and the help of the video tutorials.”

When I was an advanced beginner this kind of a pattern would have brought me to tears, but if you love a challenge, and a project that you’ll wear and get tons of astonished reactions every time, this is the project for you. And of course if you have a few double knitting projects under your belt and are comfortable reading charts, this project shouldn’t be hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s fast. But lots of great things take time, and that’s never stopped us before, right?

You can get a copy of this pattern from Monstra & Mirabilia on Ravelry.

[Photo: Monstra & Mirabilia ]

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