Lilac Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap

Nice bit of forward thinking: winter will be upon us and Little Miss will need a hat. Last winter, the only hat that actually remained on her head had a chin strap. It was a hand-me-down from my beloved sister-out-of-law and it kept both my niece & nephew warm through 70s Bavarian winters.

So, I hunt about for a similar pattern and find the Norwegian Sweet Baby Cap – then get some soft Debbie Bliss baby cashmerino wool in a light lilac (340051) from John Lewis.

Using DK instead of the recommended “baby weight” (which is what exactly?) means my gauge is all out of whack so I adjust it by

• casting on only 107 stitches
• using 4mm needles
• on the increase/decrease row, reduce the stitches between increase/decrease to 15, 16, 16, 16, 16, 15.

NB These adjustments are part measurement, part guesswork – I’m no deft mathematician, nor experienced gauge calculator. I just choose the needle size cos they are the smallest circular needles I have. The stitch looks ok so I knit a few rounds in garter stitch as per the instructions, then try it on Little Miss’s head. It’s clearly too big, so I mark out how many stitches go round her head and start again casting on fewer stitches. Then divvy up the non-increase/decrease stitches as evenly as I can.

I keep trying the hat on her as I go, so make only two further adjustments:

• only repeat the increase/decrease row 8 times
• add a 10 row garter stitch chinstrap with two cast-off buttonholes.

Overall, it’s a really simple pattern, if you know how to knit, purl, increase and decrease. And it finishes up satisfyingly quickly, speeding up rapidly as you decrease towards the wee point.

I locate a silver metal button that I *think* came from a dirndl skirt of my mother’s (she lived in the Austrian/German alps for a chunk of the sixties). My older brother recognised it immediately anyway (“Wow”, he said), and he’s not a button kind of guy.

Problem. The hat has not stayed on Little Miss’s head for more than two seconds. Hence no modelled pics. Any tips?

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Update

A week after completion and the hat stays ON.

Could it have anything to do with the hypnotic qualities of CBeebies?

A sugar high?

Or the sudden drop in temperature over the weekend?

Who cares! Result! Pics!