Masterclass
Knitting hats from side to side requires a new way of thinking about construction. Woolly Wormhead shows us how it’s done
Woolly Wormhead explores the construction and design of sideways-knitted hats
About our expert Woolly Wormhead is a ‘hat architect’ with an instinctive flair for unusual construction and a passion for innovation, whose patterns are trusted and celebrated by knitters all over the world. You can find all her hat designs at www.woollywormhead.com
KNITTING OR
designing) a sideways knitted hat is really rather different from knitting a vertical hat (which would be worked from the top down or bottom up).
With a hat knitted side to side, your knitting is turned through 90 degrees; crown shaping is dealt with by short rows; any depth changes are created by increases or decreases. It can be a little tricky to get your head round at first, but once you’re into the flow, it’s a whole lot of fun.
SLICING THE OTHER WAY
To help us understand how differently a sideways hat is constructed is to a vertical hat, let’s look at these diagrams.
When we knit a vertical hat, we usually start at the brim edge and work bottom-up (and occasionally we start at the crown and work down). We generally either work flat (in rows) and have a seam up the centre back, or work in the round, seamlessly. Either way, we would work one part of the hat first, the brim followed by the body and so on, until we finish the hat at the crown (this would be reversed with a top-down hat; starting at the crown and
finishing at the brim). The stitches we cast on would wrap around the head horizontally, and our knitting would grow vertically. See diagram 1.
When we knit a sideways knitted hat, everything is turned through 90 degrees. The brim of the hat is created by the selvedge of our piece of knitting, and the crown is worked with short rows. We don’t knit the hat in separate but consecutive parts; each row we work on a sideways knit hat touches on each part of the hat, every time. See diagram 2.
THINKING ABOUT SECTIONS DIFFERENTLY
If we were to work a typical beanie with eight lines of decreases/8 sts decreased every other round throughout the crown, it would look a little like diagram 3 if broken down and laid flat. You wouldn’t necessarily see the vertical lines separating the sections, but within the structure, they are there. (Remember how I said that the best way to start designing a hat is to think about the crown structure and multiples first? They were placed there then, albeit invisibly, dependent on stitch pattern.)
This doesn’t actually change for a sideways knit hat – what changes is our direction of knitting – as shown in diagram
4 - and how we construct the various parts. Whereas with a vertically knit hat stitch gauge is the most important factor in fit, with a sideways knit hat row gauge is.
WHAT ABOUT SHAPING?
When we turn our hat knitting through 90 degrees, we make subtle yet major
changes to the purposes of our stitches. Stitch gauge determines length rather than circumference, and increases or decreases affect length, not width.
If we look at the crown shaping, which is the fundamental part to style and fit, we can see the differences more clearly.
In diagram 5, we are looking at the crown segments of a vertically knit hat, with the arrows indicating the direction of shaping. Their path will vary depending on your decrease pattern, whether it be K2tog, SSK (shown) or a combination of decreases. Either way, though, the decreases will occur vertically as you knit, changing the shape of the top of the sections from their full width to a narrow point.
In diagram 6, we can see that the direction of knitting has changed, and that to create the same effect in the top of the sections we would work short rows to reduce the depth and bring them to a narrow point for the crown. The short rows are not worked separately from the body or any other part of the hat; as we mentioned before, when you are working sideways you knit stitches from each part of the hat. The short rows would then work the full width of your knitting (i.e the full length of your hat).
MORE ABOUT SHORT ROWS
With sideways knitting, we don’t just use short rows to shape a crown – they are also used to shape a brim.
With a vertically knit hat, we would generally increase 50% of our stitches after the brim band to create a beret, or somewhere between 10% and 30% to create a slouchy hat. When we’re working sideways, those increases translate to short rows, and the percentages stay the same. So, bearing in mind that every short row equates to two rows in length, we would place a short row after every four rows worked to create a beret-shaped body.
We would place the short row at the part of the row where the brim becomes the body, which in turn means that the brim will be shorter in rows (where rows are the key part of our stitch for fit!).
When you’re working sideways, it’s often helpful to place stitch markers at the points where the anatomy of the hat changes, or where the short rows should occur. As your knitting grows, the development of the structure becomes more apparent.
THE MATHS OF THE CROWN
The maths for a sideways hat is the same as for a standard hat, except you swap stitch gauge/count for row gauge/count.
The roles of the circumference and radius remain the same; we are still creating a cylinder with a flat circle on top,
only we are doing it on it’s side, not sitting up. So the circumference of your knitting is the length of your knitting prior to seaming or grafting. Despite this difference, the maths for calculating the crown remains the same.
Let’s look at the maths for a basic beanie from my first hat design article (Crown Shaping Masterclass in Issue 97) again, and swap stitches and rows around.
Using our previous example of a hat knit in DK with a gauge of 22 sts to 10cm, we can assume that the row gauge (at a ratio of 3:4) would give us approximately 30 rows to 10cm. To achieve the same finished size of 45.5cm (the perfect finished size for the average adult female, allowing for 6.5cm of negative ease), we would want to knit a total of 136 rows.
The basic formula for a vertically knit beanie is 8 sts decreases every other row, which gives us 8 lines of decrease in the crown, essentially dividing the hat up into 8 sections. Transposed, that would become 8 panels in our sideways knit hat, with each panel consisting of 17 rows. Unfortunately, if we knit consecutive sections with odd rows we wouldn’t create a hat, we’d create a rectangular shape, and so we need to ensure there are an even number or rows in each section. As it’s always better to add extra negative ease rather than take it away, we’ll work with 128 rows total, or 16 rows to each section, which will give us a finished size of 42.5cm. 42.5cm/6.28 ( 2 x pi) = 6.8cm crown circle radius With our stitch gauge of 22 sts to 10cm or 2.2cm to 1cm, we can calculate how many stitches we need to have in the crown section:
6.8 ( length of radius in cm) x 2.2 ( number of stitches per cm) = 14.96 sts, rounded to 15 sts
For each stitch wrapped we work 2 rows, and so if we wrapped every stitch of the crown we would have 32 rows in each section, which is a lot more than we need and our cylinder would be too big! (the first and last row of each section, which are non-wraps rows, are also included in the section row count).
We would then only wrap every other stitch, which would give us the correct number of rows for the panel. Our crown then consists of 128 rows worked over 8 sections, with 15 sts worked as short rows in each section. We will have 16 row edges at the crown end of our knitting, and we would thread our yarn through each of the row edges after seaming/grafting and tighten to close, just as we would with a vertically knit hat.
DETERMINING THE LENGTH
Now that we know we need to allow 15 sts for the crown, we need to determine how many stitches to cast on for the body and the brim. With our basic beanie example, the body and the brim are essentially one piece; although we may wish to change the stitch pattern between the sections, for the sake of our cast-on numbers we treat them as one.
Looking at a size chart for length vs circumference of different head/hat sizes (found at woollywormhead.com/sizing) we can see that the overall length for an average female adult hat is 21cm. 21cm ( intended overall length of hat) x 2.2 ( number of stitches per cm) = 46.2 sts, rounded to 46 sts However, we have already learnt that the overall length of a hat also includes the crown radius, which in this example is 15 sts, so the number of stitches in our body/ brim section is 31 sts. Overall, we would cast on 46 sts, and if you wish to graft or otherwise seamlessly finish this hat, you would cast the stitches on provisionally.
BEYOND THE BEANIE
You can apply the same maths to a beret or slouchy hat; the differences between the styles has been covered previously, but essentially the body length of a beret is the same as a beanie, only it’s a wider cylinder and so has a larger circle at the crown – the extra stitches that you would cast on for a sideways knit beret would mostly be part of the crown section.
To create a gathered finish, you would simply ensure that the number of stitches in the crown section is less than that required to give a flat circle – this way, once all panels are worked, the radius of the crown is much shorter than the circumference requires, and will gather.