Making felted hats is fun! They take 2 1/2 to 3 ounces of heavy worsted weight yarn and are quickly knitted up on size 10.5 needles. See the "before" picture (below right) to get an idea of how much they change from finished knitting to finished felting in the washing machine. The purple/rose hat (left) is made from dyed New Zealand Romney wool. Its band is spool knit from corespun hand-dyed New Zealand mohair plied with a gold boucle thread. The white hats are all done in Tunis wool raised by Gary and Sandy Sojka of Bend-in-the-Creek Farm in Middleburg, Pennsylvania. The hats on the left were all made during January/February 2004 based on patterns by Beverly Galeskas in Felted Knits (Interweave Press, 2003, p. 38).

The ten Tunis hats below were made during the spring and fall of 2004. Several brim styles are represented, and each hat has a different treatment of its spool-knit band. Five have different knots, and five have different arrangements of hand-carved bone beads.