Nautical Anchor Hat Knitting Pattern

I don’t really feel like I should need to write any words on this post for you to want to make this adorable hat for a baby in your life.

Or maybe not even a baby. A toddler or a little kid? It’s even sized for teens and adults so you can make them for everyone at the clam bake or on the whale watching expedition.

And even if your lifestyle doesn’t include weekends at the cape or on the shore, you can still stitch up this sweet hat for any beach loving person you know. This would be so cute for a newborn photo shoot with a nautical theme or for a little one with an ocean-themed nursery.

The hat is super easy to work, too, because it’s knit just with the nautical stripes and the anchor is added afterward with duplicate stitch. This is an easy way to add a little graphic element to a pattern without having to deal with doing stranded colorwork or intarsia when you have just a little bit of color to a project.

You could, of course, make it even easier by knitting the hat in a solid color, or just doing the stripes and not adding the anchor. But it’s so darn cute (and this is really an easy technique).

If you’ve never done duplicate stitch before, check out my tutorial all about how to do it. Once you get the mechanics of how it works it’s actually pretty quick to do. For the anchor you do have to read a chart, but it’s such a simple design that shouldn’t be a problem (and of course you can kind of freehand a design based on this anchor pattern if you’d rather).

You can grab the free pattern from Fox & Pine Stitches.

[Photo: Fox & Pine Stitches]

Booklets Full of Knits to Keep You Warm

Basic Beginner Knit Hat for Kids and Adults

One of the fun things about knitters is that we will use a holiday theme on any kind of project. From Easter bunny socks to Christmas sweaters, there’s no combination of holiday motif and knitwear genre we won’t combine.

Case in point: Halloween cowls.

This fun cowl from Sweet Vireo Designs features large carved pumpkins and little cats and skulls. It uses two colors of DK weight yarn and I love the multicolored yarn for the background color on this one. And the braids! So cute.

Spooky Season by Jocelyn Tunney (also on Ravelry) uses fingering weight yarn in two colors to make a design with crescent moons and eyes. There are two circumferences and two heights available so you can make it a neck hugger or a slightly bigger project if you like.

Make more moons with the Broom Riding Cowl from Vanessa Ewing Knits. This two color pattern looks extra fun with a multicolored yarn for the colorwork, but you can use a solid as well. It calls for DK weight yarn but there is also a fingering weight version if you have some yarn in your stash you want to use.

Jinx Made has another fun Halloween cowl, this time covered in skulls. South Philly Skulls uses DK weight yarn and comes in two lengths, and there’s also a matching hat pattern, both of which can be found on Ravelry.

The Ghost Stories cowl from Melissa Knit Wear is a two-color cowl with ghosts of different sizes on the body. It uses DK weight yarn, and average sized skeins will allow you to get two cowls out of two skeins. It also calls for stitch markers to help you keep your place in the chart.

Or stitch up a cowl with a giant bat on it. The Nightling Cowl from Jen Immer uses DK weight yarn in two colors and has moons and a large bat on it. This pattern can be found on Ravelry.

How about spooky trees? The Weirwood Cowl from Andrea Krüß-Anders is inspired by the weirwood trees in the Game of Thrones books, and is worked in two colors of fingering weight yarn. You can find this free pattern on Ravelry.

If a bandana cowl is more your thing, try Cowloween from Tellybean Knits (on Ravelry). This colorful design is worked from the top down and features pumpkins, ghosts and candy colored stripes, and is worked in a light fingering weight yarn. There are kid and adult sizes available.

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