Year of Hats: August Hat

We love hats—we love designing them, we love wearing them, we love giving them to our friends and family, but we also love our friends design hats, too! Fortunately, we know many talented designers, so for the second half of our Year of Hats series we’ve invited a few of our friends to share the hat love!

Meet the August Hat, a lovely, Latvian-inspired beauty by Sarah Solomon. This is the first stranded color work hat of the series, but she kept it simple, interesting, and fun using 2 colors of Germantown, a sweet motif, and Latvian braids.

Sarah’s August Hat is refreshingly different from the previous hats in our Year of Hats series. Her design aesthetic celebrates traditional knitting techniques applied to modern knitwear designs. The gentle color work motif body of this hat is framed with two Latvian braids, which serves both as a decorative and fabric stabilizing feature.

Latvian braids are fun to work and yield beautiful results; if you’re new to this technique, fear not! Find our Latvian braid tutorial here, which breaks them down in a row-by-row photo tutorial.

Latvian braids are a twisty little technique, which creates a horizontal braid on the “public side” of the work. They’re created by purling and carrying one strand of yarn over the other. Follow the tutorial to unlock the mystery!

As months past, we’ve put together a kit for the August Hat, which includes:

• 2 skeins of Germantown; one in myrtle and one in sage.
• 2 butterflies of Perennial in pineapple and sage.
• 1 Kelbourne Woolens custom leather tag.