Tanners hat

I have had someone ask how Tanners hat was made.  Well, Masons was made the same way but Tanners is the one I posted to a group.


These were machine made but the same thing can be done on a knitting loom.


I used a bulky knitting machine which is actually about a small to fine gauged loom.  The yarn was a sports weight yarn.  If you want to use a larger loom use a worsted weight with the knit stitch or two strands of worsted if using the e-wrapped stitch.


You need a loom with an even amount of pegs.  


Ewrap all the pegs to cast on.


Knit for five to ten rows using the knit stitch, if you use the e-wrapped stitch the hat is going to have that slanted stitch look but that is ok, it is cute also.  How many rows you do depends on how big you want the brim to be.  Tanners was seven rows.


Now you are going to drop and reform stitches.


Take the second stitch off the peg and drop it pulling it all the way to the bottom ewrapped cast on.


Now you use a crochet hook or you can use a latch hook to pick back up the stitches.


From the inside of the loom, ws (wrong side), put your crochet hook between the bottom strand and the next strand up, and do a little twist to get this bottom strand wrapped around the hook.


Now grab the next strand above and pull it through.  Continue picking up strands till you have the last one on the hook.  Put that last one back on the empty peg.  This is called reforming stitches.


Skip the next peg and reform the next one and every other stitch around the loom.


After you have reformed every other stitch continue to knit for as long as you need your hat to be, minus a row or two.


Now move every other stitch over one peg, wrap the pegs and knit off.  This does a simple decrease to stop some of the bulk at the top of the hat for the gather.


Remove all stitches on a strand of yarn and gather the top.


Tip:  Another way to decrease some more bulk at the top of the hat is to use a thinner material to remove and gather the top.  So if you have some strong thread use it, or if you are using worsted weight use sports or baby sport to gather the top.  The less material you have in the gather the less the bulk at the top.


This is a very simple hat to do.  The reforming is a simple forming by sections knit stitches to purl stitches.  This to me is faster then the purl by one peg at a time and gives a slightly different look then the normal purl, is really easy to do and I like it.  It also gives practice on picking up stitches (backward granted but gives the idea anyway).