Merry Mohawks and Baby Beanies

You may have noticed a different look to the blog this weekend. What can I say? I got bored. Blame it on the whole New Year thing. I decided to go for a more minimalist look. Plus, I nixed the left-hand side bar to make room to bigger pictures in the posts. Hope you like it!

Continuing to catch up on un-blogged holiday gifts, today brings you a triple play of adorable with my nephews and niece and their new hats.

The boys got festively colored mohawks. I worked each hat from the top down with the increases paired in such as way as to make an obvious line of stitches down the center front and center back. That made it super easy to keep the mohawk straight when it came time to attach all that fringe.

They're made of warm, worsted weight wool (Lion Brand Lion Wool in Scarlet), held double for a bulky gauge. For the mohawk, I used a loosely spun, single ply wool (Cascade Soft Spun in color #2851), making the strands stick to themselves a bit for a style-able mohawk, to a degree at least.

So much cooler than Santa hat, no?

The 3-month-old niece got a set of top-knotted toques, refashioned from a friend's out-grown (well, under-grown) pajamas and a shirt, all super soft jersey fabric.

I used this pattern as a guide and snipped the hat shape out of a paper bag. Then, instead of sewing a separate cuff like the original, I just laid my pattern piece along the bottom hem of each garment and cut through both layers of fabric.

With right sides facing, I pinned and stitched my hats together.

Then I flipped them each right-side-out and knotted the top. Tada!

Unfortunately, I didn't get any pics of the hats with an actual baby head in them, but trust me, it was cute.