The hat part was easy, just a basic beanie in their school colors. I decided to make the stripes a little more interesting by purling the first row of every color change.
I don't have a lot of practice knitting hats, so even though I knew how to do it, I was pretty excited that it came out well. The beard was another story.
I decided to use this pattern here. It was the only knit pattern on Ravelry that I thought looked good. I had bought sport weight yarn for the hat, so I had to double up since the pattern was written for bulky weight. I couldn't help but hold it up to my face every few rows, and everything seemed fantastic, until I got near the end. I'm unsure if I read the pattern wrong or if there was a mistake, but I didn't have as many stitches as I should have. I ended up being short one row but I didn't think it would make much of a difference. I attached it to the hat with some clips and tried it on, and I was so excited!
I immediately went to show my husband, who started laughing. He asked me when he could bring it to our niece, and as I started telling him how I still needed to stitch it all together, this happened.
Thanks to my cool new clips, I was able to try out different ways of attaching the beard. Sadly, no matter what I did (tighter, looser, further from my temples) the darn thing started to droop. Since this was my first beard hat, I can't say for sure that this would happen every time, but I have a feeling that since knit items are so stretchy jaw movement would pull down almost any beard.
I'm curious to know if crochet beard hats have the same problem, so that has been added to my To-Do List. But I think it's pretty safe to say that beard hats are pretty much only useful for hilarious photos, and not for wearing full time anyway.
I decided to make the beard button onto the hat, so her boyfriend can wear it and get some funny pictures, but take off the beard if it gets annoying. Hopefully he gets some more use out of it that way!
