There are so many great things about knitting for charity. The number one great thing being that you can do something special for a cause using your mad knitting skills. It’s nice to use your knitting powers for good. Urban Yarns will be knitting up some more hats for charity in the next few weeks for Save the Children/ Caps for Good Campaign. Hats will be displayed at TNNA in January then distributed to new moms and their babies through Save the Children programs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Save the Children offers a downloadable kit to help you create your caps complete with free patterns You can Click here to download the Save the Children/Caps for Good Campaign kit. You can drop your caps by UY and Anina and Jan will bring them to TNNA themselves. Otherwise you can mail them to the following address by January 4th.
Alice Peterson Co.
Att: Caps for Good
118 Center Street
El Segundo, CA 90245
310.322.0600
* Please make sure your cap has a “cap tag” which must accompany each cap – click here for the cap tag.
I have been knitting up some hats myself, somewhat compulsively. This hat pattern has pretty much everything I love in a hat: Fair Isle techniques, pompoms, and Blue Sky Alpacas Sport and Melange. They are also adorably small for all the little rugrats coming into the world. The other great thing about these hats is that they whip up in an evening, charts and all!
I started with the classic hat, colours just like the pattern. Then I thought, why not take this colourwork a step further? These hats are a great way to explore the colour wheel and different colour combinations in a low investment project. 4 skeins of BSA makes more than a couple of hats and you really don’t need much for the pattern part.
It’s interesting to see how differently the hats look with more and less contrast between colours. For this fall inspired hat I really thought there was enough contrast between the yellow, red, and orange but the pattern is definitely harder to pick out than in the hats with a white/cream background. I sometimes find it hard to tell whether colour combinations will work or not without using the old trial and error method. The human eye can see the contrast so clearly between 2 skeins of yarn but it’s a little harder when there are only a few stitches of each colour.
To make a Giacomo Baby Hat of your very own, for yourself or for charity you will need:
Yarn: 4 skeins Blue Sky Alpacas Sport or Melange
Needles: 3.5mm 16″ circular needle, 3.75mm 16″ circular needle, 3.75mm double pointed needles
Other: pompom maker (I used the green one, the second largest size), darning needle for those pesky ends, 1 stitch marker
The pattern: you can find the free pattern here.
