Yarn Hacks: DIY Ponytail Hat!

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If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few months, you are probably seeing the ponytail hat everywhere. They seemed to just kind of come out of the woodwork all of a sudden. Some people love them, some people hate them. Regardless of which camp you belong to, there is no denying that they are a pretty unique project. You can use a pattern like the ones in the link above to get a very specific style, or you can just make it up as you go with any hat pattern! In this week’s edition of Interweave Yarn Hacks, we show you how to turn any hat pattern into a ponytail hat pattern. While we focused on a knit hat in this video, I don’t know why a comparable concept wouldn’t work for a crochet hat, as long as it starts on the bottom! (Crochet people, please tell me if I am wrong and that I know nothing about crochet, because that is basically true!) The method I used to convert the Knitted Knots Hat pattern (by designer Bonnie Sennott) was pretty simple. It took just a little bit of trial and error, but essentially it’s all about following the hat pattern until it’s time to start the decreases, and then adjust from there. You may start the decreases earlier than the hat pattern calls for, like I did for this pattern. It depends on the fit of the original hat. This hat has a little more room up top, so I started the decreases a little earlier than what the pattern called for, in order to have a snug fit on the crown of the skull. I didn’t worry too much about the number of decreases, but did some basic math so that I would end up with approximately half the original number of stitches over an inch or two (I did not use knit rounds in between decrease rounds like is typical; every round was a decrease round until I got to that “magic number”). After about half of the stitches were decreased, I did a regular bind-off. This left a nicely sized hole at the top of the hat and also made this hat the shape I wanted it for ponytail success. Have you tried crafting your own DIY ponytail hat without a pattern, or by adjusting an existing pattern? What was the method you tried, and do you have any tips for folks out there converting their own hat patterns to be ponytail-friendly? Happy DIY Ponytail-Hat-Making! —Hannah