Knit Little Red Hats for Preemies

You may not know this, but my little girl was a preemie, born six weeks early. We were lucky and she didn’t have any major health problems, and only spent a week in the NICU.

But a lot of families have babies who are in the hospital much longer, and it can be difficult to feel like celebrating holidays when your little one isn’t home.

One awesome photographer in the Kansas City area has rallied a bunch of people to help make Christmas a little more special for families with babies in the hospital, by providing them with little red hats and a visit from Santa. (Just thinking about this makes me cry a little, so if you’re a sap like me do not watch the video. You’ve been warned.)

Jessica Storm of Believe in Preemies is collecting hats for local hospitals again this year, and they’re needed by December 7. You can email believeinpreemies @ gmail.com to get the pattern and shipping address. It’s asked that all hats be knit in red with white trim so the babies match Santa, and hats of various sizes, from teeny to full-term are needed.

We’re pretty close to Kansas City and a local yarn store is collecting hats to send, so I’m definitely going to have to stitch some up. (While Santa can only visit a couple of hospitals, all the hats are distributed to local NICUs, so all the hats will be used to spread holiday cheer.)

Let’s overwhelm them with tiny red hats, why don’t we?

[Photo via Believe in Preemies.]

Next Pattern:

As I write this, it’s probably time to start thinking about winter knitting if you haven’t already. And it’s definitely time to think about gift knitting if you have any of that you plan to do for the holidays.

The Dreamy Waves Scarf from Knit Picks, designed by Stacey Winklepleck, would be a great project to go in either category.

It uses two different multicolored yarns and a simple repeating wave pattern to make a project that looks a lot more complicated and dramatic than it is. The gradient look happens naturally just by switching which yarn you’re knitting with.

This pattern uses worsted weight yarn so it’s a pretty quick project even though a scarf is large and this one is pretty wide. It measures 8.5 inches (21.5 cm) wide and 63 inches or 120 cm long. Of course you can make it longer or shorter as you like. As written it takes one ball of each color so it’s a pretty economical project, too.

It’s rated for intermediate knitters but if you know how to do various increases and decreases you’ll be all set. The pattern uses knit 2 together, make 1 left and right, centered double decrease and slip slip knit. All of the stitches are explained in a glossary in the pattern so even if you haven’t done all of them it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

The pattern also includes tons of options for different colorways in yarn that Knit Picks sells, so you can see how different combinations knit up before you buy the yarn. That’s such a great idea!

Of course if you already have two multicolored yarns with long color runs on hand, you can absolutely use them, too. It might also be fun, but would give you a totally different look, to use a solid color and a bunch of scraps or one multicolored yarn to see how the different colors play together. So many options!

You can grab this free pattern and check out all the color options at Knit Picks.

[Photo: Knit Picks]

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