Click for Babies Hat – a Charitable Tessellation to Knit

Don’t want to read the post? Click right here to get this free pattern (but you really may want to read the notes!)

First things first…if you haven’t heard of the Click for Babies campaign, you need to go to their site and check it out right now. It’s ok. I’ll wait.

Back with me? Good 😀

For those of you who didn’t take a peek, Click for Babies is a campaign that provides information, support resources, and (in Nov. and Dec.), purple hats to parents of newborns.

The goal of the campaign is to reduce instances of shaken-baby syndrome and other abuses that can occur when a stressed-out, sleep-deprived, perhaps depressed new parent is confronted with a baby who is themselves in need of something or in pain and is therefore screaming their precious little face right off.

I mean, I was lucky in that I had a “good baby” (as opposed to those bank-robbing, gun-toting “bad babies”? :P) and so we didn’t go through much crying around here. And when our son did cry, I had a husband I could hand him off to when I just absolutely could.not.stand.the.noise.one.more.second.

But parent-child situations are just as unique as the people involved in them, and terrible things can happen, and Click for Babies does their part to make sure that those terrible things don’t happen.

So that is why I spend time knitting hats for them, every year, scattered in between other knitting projects because let’s face it, hats are tiny and cute and almost instant gratification.

This hat is based on a tessellation…which I’m kind of obsessed with right now. First of all, tessellation is just a fun word to say 😉 But it’s even more fun to design and knit, these interlocking patterns repeating with no gaps. I’ve added some filler in the center of each octagon, just to shake it up a little.

The colourwork is fully charted, since I’m pretty certain that colourwork would be impossible to follow if it said things like k1 MC, k3 CC, k1 MC, etc-eye-crossing-etc.
Cast-on, ribbing, and decrease/finishing instructions are written.

Currently it’s only sized for newborns, although an adult version will be released soon. (The eagle-eyed among you will realize that the chart is 20 stitches wide, with a 10-stitch repeat, and can easily be scaled up or down based on that…no waiting necessary!)

The sample hat uses 20g of DK yarn (15 in the main colour, 5 in the contrast colour), and was worked on US 6 / 4mm needles using 80 stitches/8 repeats.

It features the Chinese Waitress cast-on, which I just learned from this excellent tutorial to use in this hat.
However, any stretchy cast-on will work, including the Twisted German cast-on.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

You’re free to use it to create (and release) your own non-commercial patterns, although this same license must be attached to it.

You are absolutely free to hand-knit hats to sell from this pattern, and if you do so I hope you a) make the money your time is worth and b) will consider knitting at least one for the very worthwhile non-profit it was designed for.

And before I link to the pattern, one caveat…this one isn’t test-knit. I’ve knit it twice from my own pattern, but I’m aware that it’s super-easy to miss something that way. So if it’s confusing or you spot any errors, please let me know. I’ll be glad to update the pattern for clarification or with errata.

Click for Babies Hat

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