My best friend has recently become a Grandma for the first time. Now I am the only one of “us” who does not have that title. I have the most children, but may never have grand babies. Who knows? I can’t blame people for not wanting to raise kids in this world. Lots of young people are sticking to raising furbabies instead.

So, I am knitting for her grand baby, and of course I am making little baby hats.

Needle size 4US, cast-on 72. I use the German Twisted CO. Go from there and create your own little hat. I guessed at height as I don’t have a baby’s head handy for trying on!

Make Them Washable!

First off, any baby items need to be easy to care for. Although hats will probably not get all that dirty, when the time comes for cleaning, they must be machine washable. We can’t expect any new parents to take the time to hand-wash anything!

All the yarn I used is sock yarn, which is washable. But then I wanted to add a pompom to the green and purple hat.

Making My Pom Pom

Is pompom two words or one? I’m trying it both ways, so I will be right at least part of the time.

Pompoms can be made without a little pompom maker gadget, but the gadget is fun and there are lots of videos to show you how to use it.

However, do you make the pompom and add it before washing, or after? If the hat is ever to be washed again… which hopefully it will be at some point …. don’t you want to know that the pompom will hold up? Yarn is dirty, so it must be washed, and the pompoms should be added once the hat is knit, before washing – unless it’s a fur pompom. That is another blog post – some you can wash, I think.

If you don’t have a pompom maker like the one in my photo below, you can make a pompom using cardboard. This blog post shows one way to do that. Some people use forks. There is lots of info out there.

If you have any hat knitting books, chances are they may include a “how to” for pompoms and tassels. My pompom maker was really too large, so I had to cut the finished pompom down quite a bit.

How to Add a PomPom to a Hat

I knew from experience that pompoms can be floppy if they are not attached correctly. And I always thought I needed to use the ends from the pompom to secure it. The secret is to use the hat yarn to go up through the pompom and back down again. To see how, check out this wonderful tutorial about “how to add a pompom to a hat”. the video is excellent.

Then I Lost My Pompom

When I began hand-washing, which is soaking really, the last hat I made, which is the green and purple one, suddenly there were bits of yarn all over the sink! The whole pompom came apart, so now the hat has nothing on top. And, I’ve wasted a bunch of yarn. And I am wondering how to finish this hat. Maybe a tassel would work.

I’m also wondering why this happened. Possibly the yarn was too silky, so the strands slipped right out.

The orange and pink striped had was knit using hand-spun yarn from two different skeins. I really like the look of that one.

I had knit the Curly Snowflake Hat and purple baby hat at about the same time, so after the pompoms were attached, I washed them together in the sink. The difference is the yarn: the big hat is wool, and the baby hat is sock. The gray pompom held up to the soak, but not the little one.