Designing Knitted Hats

I never really thought I would be able to design hats, I still feel like such a beginning knitter. I think that’s because I don’t knit sweaters or blankets or other super huge projects. I do knit a lot of hats though and I realized that I was always changing them up a bit to make them the way I wanted to make them, hmmm I guess that is sort of designing.

This all started because I love cupcakes and I wanted to knit little baby cupcake hats. There are plenty of cupcake hat patterns out there, but nothing like I wanted, the frosting just wasn’t quite right. I made a couple with cherries on top and they turned out cute, but the cherry was too nipple like for my satisfaction and it was just one more thing to sew on. I thought about a pompom, but nah and how many cupcakes have I really eaten with a cherry on top anyway! So I’ve been working on this:

It looks nice modeled on this jar and I’m getting close, but when I put it on a head: The frosting needs to be taller/rounder and this yarn wasn’t the best choice, the colors are great though. I also need to make that top tail a bit longer and tack it down in a curl shape. I might even want to add another layer to the icing frill.

I also saw a boy wearing a fleece raccoon hat and thought it would be a lot cuter knitted. It’s close too, just a little more tweaking and some eyes: I’m trying to decide if the ear-flaps are really what I want or if a striped and ribbed band around the bottom of a regular hat would be better and exactly what sort of eyes I’m going to make.

I like to share some of the process of what goes into a design, I would love to hear what you guys think of these two hats. I’m also trying to decide what to do with my pile of imperfect samples: throw them out, unravel them, give them away, sell them as one offs…what are your thoughts?