DIY: Knit Constellate Hat by Hunter Hammersen

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Hunter Hammersen is one of our favourite knitwear designers. We follow her on Instagram and Tomiko already knit her free cowl pattern, the Consilience Cowl. When she published Firmament: Stellar Stitches for Your Next Adventure in August 2018, I bought a hard copy. I loved the beautiful and unusual stitches that she used to make darling hats. Her Constellate Hat is the first hat that I knit from this collection. I also included it in my 2019 make nine grid!

I cast on 120 stitches and used 2.75 mm needles to make an adult-size hat. The pattern includes stitch and needle suggestions to get the proper size, but I ignored her recommendation to swatch. I was just itching to cast on!

To knit the hat, I used Wellington Fibres yarn, a fingering weight yarn that is 60% mohair and 40% wool, from the Wellington Fibres company in Ontario. I believe I bought this yarn from their stall at the Woodstock Fleece Festival last year. The colour is a richly saturated purple, and the tonal effect knits up beautifully.

The Wellington Fibres yarn was amazing to work with. Tomiko and I visited the mill last summer, but we didn’t get a chance to see their angora goats. Mohair takes dye beautifully, and the deep, tonal purple yarn has a lustrous shine and slight halo. We’ve heard that Wellington Fibres is an in-demand mill in southern Ontario because they carbonize their yarns using sulfuric acid. This means that there will be some vegetable matter in the yarn. I don’t mind that, because I get a lot of satisfaction pulling the small bits out! Other small fibre producers also use Wellington Fibres to mill their yarn. We’ve heard they are the perfect size for small minimums but are big enough that they can turn out a good product very quickly.

The pattern starts with a lot of ribbing with twisted stitches before starting with the dip stitches. Both sides of the knitting are beautiful, making this hat completely reversible!

The dip stitch pattern is only six rows, and has only four to six stitches as a repeat. I was able to memorize the pattern quite easily. I wanted to make sure that the hat was tall enough, so I knit thirteen dip stitch rows. Hunter Hammersen says she likes fast decreases, and indeed the decrease chart had only five rows.

Of course I’m now ready to knit all the other hats from this collection! I even included the Ephemeris Hat in my 2019 make nine list.

The Constellate Hat pattern is available on Ravelry here.

You can also purchase this hat in our Etsy shop here.