This is a fun and rather unusual hat by Anja Sammon. The FourKnocks Hat was designed around a piece of Stone Age pottery and has all sorts of intriguing stitch patterns.
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Get your pattern directly from the designer on her Ravelry page here. What we have put together is a set of yarn that should work beautifully for it.
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The Design
Here is what Anja writes on her Ravelry page:
My friend Mairtin, who works as a tour guide here in Ireland and who is an expert in Neolithic history, recently published images of sherds of a Bronze Age pottery food vessel found at an excavation site at Fourknocks in County Meath by Mr. P. J. Hartnett in 1950 - 1952. In his publication, Mairtin had worked a drawing of what the completed pot should have looked like if it was complete.
I was so fascinated by the detail on this beautiful piece that I decided to translate it into a knitting pattern.
I turned Mairtin’s drawing upside-down and designed a simple knit/purl pattern with 4-stitch cables, to be worked in the round and top down from the centre of the crown.
I used locally produced alpaca yarn held together with a strand of mohair for a pottery-like mottled colouring, to give the fabric a stiffer body, and to prevent the hat from stretching out of shape. I finished with an i-cord edge, which mimics the rolled edge of the pottery piece. The vessel is approx. 12 cm in height, so this hat is a relatively close life size reproduction.
Yarn and Colorways
She wrote to me that the hat could be knitted in one color or in two colors with stranded color work. What she used was one strand of alpaca in fingering weight together with one strand of kit silk mohair in a slightly lighter color at all times. It gave it quite a "mottled" look.
Instead of that, we decided to offer CashSilk Light, a sport weight yarn from Laines du Nord. This is part of their Luxury Line and is made up of 68% Merino Wool + 22% Silk + 10% cashmere.
Yum! It feels amazing.
Oddly both the KFI website and the Ravelry website list Cashsilk Light as having 131 yards/ 25g. The labels on the balls I have read 159 yards/ 25g. Regardless, your kit will have three balls which will be more than enough either way.
As it already has that marvelous hazy look that mohair gives, we felt that it would be perfect to knit on its own.
Our kits will allow for the one-color version.
You can see our yarns in the bottom inset photo on the top picture on this page and then the photos below that.
We have number of colorways for you to choose among.
1. Blue Grey: a medium gray with just a suggestion of blue.
2.Mauve: a lovely pink-lilac hue.
3. Teal Green: a slightly greyed teal.
4. Sea Foam: a lovely pale hue.
Three balls will make up each kit.
