It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does I continue to be amazed at how much smaller this world is when knitters are involved.

I have recently started following Joji Locatelli on Facebook, having been a fan of her designs and her knitting for a while now. Joji is an Argentinian knitwear designer based in Buenos Aires and has some of the most practical yet beautiful designs around. There is obviously another reason why I gravitated towards Joji – my dear friend Nadia lives in the same country, not quite the same city but still Argentinian!

Joji’s brother Marco posted a request on his sister’s Facebook page for knitted hats. I answered the call, along with a few other knitters. It’s just that my hats arrived in BA first…by way of China! Long story, frustrating experience with my local courier so I will spare you the gory details. You can read Joji’s version of events on her sweet blog post here.

I took some photos of the hats before sending them off. Here is my husband modelling the first three hats.


This is Rib-a-Roni by Jane Tanner made with the older version of Cloud Nine. All these hats are knit using Dubai Knits hand-dyed yarn, quite by chance really, not planned at all but I’m happy I used my own yarn for these. I made a fingering weight version of this hat a while ago, but the worsted weight version obviously went faster!

I really love the neat crown decreases on this hat! It is more pronounced on the thicker yarn, but the fingering weight hat is just as pretty. I didn’t do the p2togtbl for the crown decreases as written but I think the normal p2tog works just fine.

Naylor Street is becoming one of my go-to hat patterns. And why not? It’s simple, elegant and really quick to modify depending on whether your recipient is a boy or a girl. Add a row of eyelets and it’s fit for a girl! But even some boys can pull off the eyelet version.

The crown decreases, I think, is always one of the best features of any hat design. This is no less beautiful than others. It’s also a very quick knit and comes in sizes from newborn to huge! I can’t recommend this pattern enough. This is knitted using the newer version of Cloud Nine.

I added this pattern to my favourites a while ago but never really made one until now. I kept thinking of the KISS mantra when I was choosing what pattern to knit for Marco. And this fits the bill to a T! Simple, stretchy due to the all-round ribbing but still stylish enough to wear when skiing.

The crown decreases again take centre stage. I love how it looks more complicated than it really is. Okay so my knitting is not very neat but I hope it’s not going to give Marco any reason not to wear this hat. This is my BFL Sport, non superwash which meant I was so careful not to agitate the hat when I was soaking/blocking it. I am not a fan of non-superwash yarn because of the felting, but I have to admit I love working with this base. It softened up a lot after soaking.

I hesitated making this hat, it was the last one I made hence it was not on the stack of hats photo on top. The pattern is called Rekaviur by Bristol Ivy. It has a unique stitch pattern which at first glance looks rather feminine, but really it isn’t.

I learned how to do a tubular cast on with this hat and I love it! It’s so neat and stretchy! The pattern was giving me a rather large gap before every wrapped stitch but it evened out during blocking. I love the asymmetrical pattern on the brim and start of the body. I had to add half a repeat here as I thought it might be too small for Marco so the crown decreases had to be adjusted as well. No biggie, it was quite easy to do so. I think I will make another.

So there you have it. Four hats (and two skeins of yarn!) which were sitting on a basket on a shelf in my living room not so long ago are now halfway across the world, 8,483 miles away. That’s the equivalent of 14,930,080 yards, which equates to about 41,472 skeins of standard sock yarn (360 yards per skein). Even I don’t have that much sock yarn in stash to travel all the way to Buenos Aires!