A [Happy] Hat!
A [Happy] Hat is just the thing to use up some of your leftover fingering weight yarn! Melissa Schoenwether designed it and used bulky weight yarn the first time she knit it.
She decided to recreate the bulky yarn by playing around with several strands of fingering weight held together. She went to her carefully curated yarn collection (formerly knows as a stash) and pulled out a selection of leftover fingering weight yarns.
The first time she did this, she used four of the exact same yarn in different colorways and she added a slubby yarn for the fifth.
The second time she did this, she chose all different types of yarn; sparkly, different combinations of fibers, and different numbers of plies.
She loved the way both hats turned out!
We know that A [Happy] Hat is successful using one strand of bulky or five or six strands of fingering. However, we don’t see any reason you couldn’t use a couple of strands of DK or Sport. We’d love to hear about your experience if you decide to try that!
Add a pom pom just for fun!
One of the fun parts of using several fingering weights held together is watching the color of the hat develop. When you use size 10.5 needles for the ribbing and size 11 for the body of the hat, that happens quickly!
Melissa advises us on how to make a hat with a 3.5 inch, 4 inch, or 4.5 inch brim, depending on your taste. It would be quite easy to make a shorter brim as long as you keep the total measurement from cast on edge to the start of the decreases the same.
This hat would be a wonderful way to use up those mini skeins you bought because you loved the colors and now you can’t figure out what to do with them! Melissa made a hat out of those, also.
Chickens! Why? Because they were out on a cloudy, rainy afternoon and they were appealing!
We think this hat would be a marvelous way to get a jump start on gift knitting. Wouldn’t it be encouraging and satisfying to have several of these just waiting to be wrapped up as gifts? Besides having them for holiday gifts, they could be instant presents for any occasion. When we have people visiting, or we are the ones doing the visiting, they’d be perfect. Surely that will happen again one day soon!
Please show us your hats, we’d love to see what yarns you used and how they turned out!
Happy Knitting,
Jenny