The First Pattern of 2023

Do those of you who have been reading the blog for a while remember the days when I'd release a pattern a month? Hard to believe I used to be able to manage that. Maybe someday I'll be able to quit my full-time job and focus more on designing, but for now, I'm pretty happy with releasing patterns when I can.

My first new pattern of this year is one that's pretty simple, but I'm excited about it nonetheless. The double-ended double-thickness hat has been a big trend in the knitting world in the past couple of years. There's one pattern in particular that I'm sure you're all aware of that it seems like everyone has knit. But I have never knit one because I didn't love the crown shaping. So I knit my own version of it, knowing only the gist of how it was knit, and used the swirly crown shaping I prefer. I still wasn't entirely satisfied with how its started, and so I did some experimentation with the inside-out cast-on. Finally I "unvented" (to quote Elizabeth Zimmermann) something that worked well and looked virtually the same as a bottom-up hat finish.

And after all that, I wasn't even intending to publish what I did -- I really only was doing it to see if I could! But when I shared my finished hats on Ravelry, I had a number of people ask if would write it up as a pattern, so I did! And this morning I published it.

My version is designed to use every bit of a skein of fingering weight yarn. As you can see, it works really well with self-striping. How it's knit isn't a big mystery: You start at the center of one crown, increase until you've reached the stitch count for your size, then knit until you have just enough to knit another crown, and decrease back to the 8 stitches you started with. You'll need a scale that weighs in grams to help you use up all your yarn. It's that easy -- my tech editor even joked that she was really stretching to add some useful comments because there wasn't much to actually edit when I sent her the pattern.

The one thing that I think makes my pattern unique is the cast-on technique, which is fully explained in a photo tutorial in the pattern. I'm particularly proud of it. And I'll be using it again in my next pattern, which uses the same beginning as this pattern to create a top-down hat (with the same swirled crown) using any yarn and any gauge. I'm still debating whether to include instructions for combining the two to get a double-ended hat with any yarn, but I'm guessing many of you could figure that out on your own.

In any case, I'm happy to have this pattern out today. You'll find it on Ravelry and Payhip. And keep an eye out for the next one!