A seasonal fairisle hat pattern, with snowflakes and Christmas trees, originally inspired by the 2012 Waitrose Bag For Life design!

I’ve written the pattern up for one size, which seems to fit most teen/adult heads, but if you’re a reasonably experienced and confident knitter, it can be adapted to different head sizes by varying yarn and needles, adding more or less plain knit rows to the chart, or even changing the number of repeats.

I didn’t worry about gauge too much (my theory is that a hat will always fit someone…), but when I measured, I got about 30 stitches/ 32 rows to 4 inches.

You need two colour of DKish weight yarn. My original sample was knitted in Louisa Harding Orielle, which excitingly sparkles. It’s a very light DK, so if you use a different yarn, I imagine you’ll get a bigger hat…

I also knitted up samples in Colinette Jitterbug (nice fit on my ten year old) and Blacker Design Shetland (turned out a similar size to the Orielle, and a much better yarn for stranded colour work, as it sticks, but - alas! - no sparkle)

I reckon you need about 50g of the main colour, and 25g of the contrast. I liked the light contrast on dark main look, but you could obviously vary that.