Want to knit a hat to show your support for the #iKnitForEddie campaign - or maybe for the Design Contest? We have a few tricks up our sleeves that might help!

First you will want to start off by downloading one of our FREE #iknitforeddie patterns! We have created both a knit AND crochet patterns for your enjoyment! 


First, a note about hat construction: while you can knit a hat from the top down, most are constructed from the brim up, and that's the method we'll be looking at here. The basic recipe is easy: cast on, knit the brim, knit the body, make regular decreases so the top of the hat will be spherical, and cast off. 






We love a long-tail cast on for hat brims, for two reasons: it's simple (always a plus), and it's stretchy (essential for hats). Here's a great video of Jeanne explaining how to do a long-tail cast on.

Once you get your stitches cast on and joined into a circle (see our helpful tutorial on how to join knitting into a round), you'll knit the brim. This is usually 1-2 inches of ribbing (knits and purls in combination - we used k2, p2 on the hat above). Ribbing is stretchy so the hat will fit over the widest part of your noggin.

The body is smooth sailing - all stockinette on this hat (knit all rows, in the round) until the hat is long enough to cover most of the head. You can incorporate other stitch patterns in this section, too - texture, lace, you name it!

Then, you'll start consolidating stitches using decreases to make the circumference of the top of the hat smaller (you know, like most human heads are shaped). We used knit-two-together (k2tog) every so many stitches, every other row to make a nice, sloped decrease. We also spaced the k2togs at appropriate intervals as our rows got smaller so the decreases would line up in nice little ridges right up to the top of the hat, when we only had a few stitches left. Then we drew the yarn through those stitches and cinched up the top, and voila! A hat!

But wait, that's not all: we used duplicate stitch on this hat to make a nice, solid "E" - for Eddie, of course! And you can also add fun embellishments like pom-poms to make your hat one-of-a-kind!

We hope this little tutorial was helpful - now get out there and knit (or design!) your Eddie Hat! If you'd like to make one just like the one above, here's a handy free pattern!