Tag Archives: Michele

Comfort foods hat patterns

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Sometimes knitting what you’ve knit before can be very comforting. You know a pattern works out well. You know you won’t have any difficulty interpreting instructions. Maybe you even use the same yarn as on other knits and you don’t even need to bother with a gauge swatch. In can be just what the nurse practitioner ordered (since my doctor moved to the upper peninsula).

I was confident that the freebie DRIPS hat by Bethany Hill would work out well because I’ve knit it before.  And I think the dripping paint can look is a hoot.

I knit mine in Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride worsted and added a nice fluffy pom-pom.

Over the years since I first purchased Nicky Epstein’s 1997 book “The Knit Hat Book: 25 Hats from Basic Shapes” I’ve knit gobs of her Chameleon hats. The pattern is available now in a number of other somewhat hard-to-find publications. I treasure my copy of the book because I attended a 1997 Stitches convention and took a hat-making class from Epstein. Here’s the inscription she added to the title page of my book:

The “great hat’ she was referring to wasn’t Chameleon. It was (gulp) a pillbox style hat with big knitted flowers and leaves sewn all over it. I beg your forgiveness. But it was 23 years ago. Epstein and I both liked it. Anyway, I’ve probably knit Chameleon seven or eight times since 1997, more recently check out here and here. This current Chameleon is knit in Classic Elite Liberty Wool.

It works worn with a folded brim.

You can even wear it Robin Hood style, with the brim folded at uneven depths. And it works rolled.

It’s, it’s…a chameleon, sort of. And the crown decreases are well thought-out.

Chameleon’s definitely a knitting comfort food for me. In fact, I feel another Chameleon is likely in my very near future.

Michele by Sarah Punderson is another Ravelry freebie that’s a multiple knit for me. This time I knit it in the now-discontinued Classic Elite Chesapeake. A knitter can choose the slouch level and, in this version, I chose slightly slouchy.

Such a pretty thing. And wearing a sunny colored hat on a dull and wintry day can be a good pick-me-up.

For more of Michele, in a super-duper pick-me-up colorway, check this out.

Finally, next up is Katerina Nopp’s Wurm, one of the most popular Ravelry freebies, at 16,606 project pages by current count. Five of them are mine: Warm Wurm, Crazy Wurm, Creamsicle Wurm, Earth Wurm, and now another extravagant Crazy Wurm.

This one’s knit in Stonehedge Fiber’s Crazy, a 100% merino yarn usually described as a sport-weight. With Crazy, you get what you get–all without knots, in my experience.


Sometimes Crazy gives you a crazy surprise–like that stretch of orangey-red marl that ended up at the crown.

These are such difficult times as we live through the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. Stay safe, please. Knit on!

Imagine Knit

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Sometimes yarn surprises. At least I think so. The pattern I knit this up in is Michele, by Sarah Punderson. Free on Ravelry. Looking at the pattern photos, you see a dignified, low key, beautiful DK weight slouchy hat.

A guildmate of mine mentioned that when she saw my yarn choice for our knit-a-long, she thought I must have screws loose. Well, no. She was actually very polite about it and said something like that she’d plan to watch with interest. And, no doubt, much skepticism.

But this is one great hat. Really. It is. I’m tooting my own horn, I know, but this hat makes such a lively statement that its wearer and everyone around will put on their happy face. And how can you not love that bulls-eye crown decrease?

I know. Not everyone’s cup of tea. Our yarns start out life in our stashes like this.

And then they turn into this.

This Mountain Colors Twizzle in the Mardi Gras colorway turned into a great Rikke Hat. Rikke, designed by Sarah Young, has been knit and posted on Ravelry about 9500 times since it debuted in 2010. These yarns will pool, but tamed by the garter stitch, they work out really well. I especially like how the brim pooled differently from the body of the hat.

Sometimes you start out thinking that your wonderful skein of fingering weight Jilly, by Dream in Color, will turn out to be a shawl. And it would have made a really nice one.

But, instead, you find Martina Behm’s great one-line free pattern, Wolkig, and then your Jilly turns into something else entirely. A little silly rather than classy. Behm’s sample is a lovely pale gray. Really beautiful. But I like my version. Glass heads thinks it’s the cat’s meow.

Here’s a closer look. This pattern is worth downloading just for the fun of figuring out how the heck one round, repeated over and over, turns out like this.

I even like my Wolkig, flipped inside out.

Wolkig. It means “cloudy” in German. That is a perfect name for Behm’s gray version. Mine? I might call it something more like “cloudy with a chance of meatballs.”