Pink Speckled Constellate Hat by Hunter Hammersen

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Hunter Hammersen is one of our favourite knitwear designers. We follow her on Instagram and Tomiko already knit her free cowl pattern, the Consilience Cowl. When she published Firmament: Stellar Stitches for Your Next Adventure in August 2018, I bought a hard copy. I loved the beautiful and unusual stitches that she used to make darling hats. Her Constellate Hat was the first hat that I knit from this collection.

The pattern includes stitch and needle suggestions to get the proper size, but I ignored her recommendation to swatch. I was just itching to cast on! I used 2.5 mm needles and cast on 120 stitches to make an adult-size hat. As I had already knit this hat, I felt confident that using the same needle size would get me gauge.

This is a custom hat for one of our Etsy customers. She requested a pink colour, and after I sent her photos of pink fingering-weight yarns from our stash, she chose a skein of The Yarns of Rhichard Devrieze Thede in the colourway Delicacies. I hadn’t knit with speckled yarn before this project, but I thoroughly enjoyed it! I loved the variation of colours, including orange, magenta, and purple, which kept the hat interesting to knit. However, from far away, the speckles sort of disappear and the hat takes on a multi-dimensional effect.

The pattern starts with a lot of ribbing with twisted stitches before starting with the dip stitches. Both sides of the knitting are beautiful, making this hat completely reversible!

The dip stitch pattern is only six rows, and has only four to six stitches as a repeat. I was able to memorize the pattern quite easily. I wanted to make sure that the hat was tall enough, so I knit thirteen dip stitch rows. Hunter Hammersen says she likes fast decreases, and indeed the decrease chart had only five rows. Our customer can fold up the rim a little or a lot to get a good fit to the height of her head. Head height is a funny thing; Tomiko has a short head, and I have a tall one. Thus, a hat that would cover her ears would barely touch mine!