Just sneaking in an interesting discovery for Innocent Smoothie hats made on an Addi 22!

17/03/2022 by UKMA 1 Comment

Just sneaking back to add a PDF.

For as long as I have had my knitting machine, the thought that I could somehow create the tiny little hats that top Innocent Smoothie bottles on my Addi has niggled at me. I make them every year for their fundraising for Age Concern. In the past I have hand knit upwards of 100 hats a year – they are fab for using up scraps of yarn. I even created a couple of patterns:

But while I thought it was possible, I didn’t use my machine enough to really think thru the process. Well, in a flash on Tuesday I had a brainstorm. It took a few attempts to get what I thought was the fastest and easiest method. You may not agree my final design is the best one, so I will step you thru the iterations LOL!

I began with a simple 10 row hat, with DK weight yarn and good tension. I did about six rounds of blue and four of yellow (still having Ukraine very much on my mind) and cinched the top closed.

I found a roll of Washi tape and a spool of thread that were just the right size to match the stated dimensions of the hats (6-7 cm wide for a diameter of 12-14cm and finished at least 3 cm high) –

And my first thought for finishing was to crochet the bottom edge with a simple single crochet:

Cute, no doubt, but maybe more work than a different method. It uses less yarn then the next method as it is only a single layer of knitting. Even now I am waffling between which is the better option!

The next try was a 20 round piece, cinched top and bottom and folded in half like you would a hat, with the two cinched edges together and the edge crocheted. It makes a kind puffy looking hat so the next (final?) version was 17 rounds, with the bottom edge cinched in with thin elastic!

This version is super quick and easy, and adding a little felt flower (die cut with an ancient Sizzix die) and using the two end of the yarn from the cinching to tie a little bow, tops it perfectly. The best part about the double layer is how easy it is to hide the yarn ends between the two layers if you aren’t adding the topper or decide crocheting the edge is better. I did test a SC 2 together decrease on the folded version and I like that a lot too!

Still using the blue and yellow of the Ukraine flag, but honestly you could make this in any colours just as easy.

So yeah, just not 100% sure on the better version – on is super easy but does the double-layer make it too bulky for the bottles? Is the crochet part too fiddly? The last attempt has to be a combo of the best elements: a 10 round single layer, cinched with elastic. The trick is to cinch the much looser cast ON edge, and run the elastic thru the final row as a cast off, instead of using the tail of the yarn. But you can use the tail of the yarn to run it thru the cast off edge alongside the elastic to hide it a bit.

“Cast off” with the elastic

Cinch the cast ON edge

Run the yarn tail thru

I used a much lighter colour elastic so you could see it better but even so it isn’t super obvious. You have to put the hat on your bottle top or in my case washi tape roll so that when you tie off the yarn and the elastic you know it doesn’t become too tight to fit!

So there you go. A few different ways you can use the 22 pin Addi to make hats for the Innocent Smoothie charity campaign benefiting Age Concern!