How to Knit a Beanie: All the Basics!

in my last video I did a speed knitting tutorial to see how long it may take to knit a hat from start to finish and then after I finished that I realized that in my whole 5 years of doing YouTube I've never actually done a how to knit a hat tutorial so today I'm going to show you how to knit a beanie all the basics for beginners if you've never even thought to knit a hat before this video is gonna show you how to do it so this is the hat that I'm gonna show you how to make it's pretty basic it's just a ribbing pattern to start and then it finishes up added a couple colors but that's totally optional if you just want to do just one color yarn to make it easy I'll be showing you how to knit in the round on double pointed needles so make sure you have some of those I'll also be using a little tapestry needle at the end just to weave in the ends of the yarn otherwise I think that's about it again I just keep things pretty basic I don't go to in-depth on sizing or patterns or anything like that this is just the bare basics of how to knit a beanie be sure to subscribe because I don't know I don't want to say I don't make videos that often but I mean they're not like all the time so be sure to subscribe to stay up-to-date on when my latest video is out and let's get started so to start you're gonna be knitting in the round and we're gonna be knitting on just these four needles for the entire time depending on the size of your hat you might want to introduce a fifth needle you can even introduce a six or a seven or an eight I have a ton of double pointed needles and really you can use as many as you're comfortable with I like to use a lot just in case just because I'm paranoid about stitches slipping off you can also knit a hat with a circular knitting needle which is just the knitting needle that's connected by a little plastic thing that is usually for larger projects so if you're doing like a sweater or something like that you can do that for the body of a hat but eventually if you're on a circular knitting needle you will need to get down smaller and smaller down to double pointed needles to finish it off so to start you take your yarn and you make a slipknot we're just going to be your first stitch and put that on one of the needles and we're gonna be casting on 68 stitches the thing about sizing for a hat it's it's easy to kind of lose your head no pun intended and get kind of confused on the sizing but honestly yarn can be pretty forgiving especially for a beanie so it's gonna be stretched she's gonna have a lot of space I as a rule of thumb I always cast on 68 stitches just because that kind of fits my head the best I recommend that you knit a beanie and then you kind of just get a feel for what feels good on your head maybe you want to go out maybe you want to go down sometimes it's better to do a small hat first just as like a test run before you like go into anything serious so for this one I'm going to cast on 68 stitches so I have one here so let's do 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 as I'm casting on I'm making sure to keep this little edge this little spine here as straight and even as possible so I don't get anything twisted if it is twisted it'll look something like this and you'll get kind of messed up as you go further down the line and you'll have to start over so just be careful at this first part as you're casting on that you're keeping track of not having any twists or anything like that and my cast one method is a little different than most people's if you're watching I don't want to lose track but I basically just wrap the yarn around my finger like this and then I slip that little loop onto my needle like that wrap it around the finger slip it over the needle and then pull it not too tight so we're gonna want to divide these 68 stitches amongst three needles and then the fourth needle we're going to use as our kind of working needle so I have 20 stitches on this needle and to keep it simple I'm just gonna do 20 20 20 and then add on 8 so 20 20 and 28 on the last one so to move on to the next one I keep my stitches as neatly and kind of orderly as possible and I set that down like this and then pick up the next needle and you just go straight into casting on that one so make my little loop here and scoop it on to there so there's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 and as you go you can rotate everything just to make it a little easier 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 and 20 set that one down spread out the stitches a little bit and make sure there's no twists or anything like that pick up my third one and we'll be casting on 28 on this one so there's one [Music] two three four five gonna rotate a little bit 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 things down a little bit 22 23 24 25 26 27 and 28 so here is what I have now I've got 20 stitches on this needle 20 stitches here and 28 on this needle I actually probably should have done this in Reverse so 28 on this first needle just because we're gonna end up knitting a couple more stitches on this needle and kind of overloading it just a tiny bit but it's fine either way as long as in total we've got 68 stitches or however many you want now from here we're going to start knitting in the round and to do that we're going to just basically connect these two needles and start knitting so we're going to knit this first stitch that's on this needle right here and we're gonna knit it with this needle first and we're just going to connect them so we're gonna need it with this needle scoop off this one knit it with our working yarn it's easy to accidentally use the tail end of your yarn but just make sure you don't do that so I'm going to carefully scooch these stitches to the end of the needle here and we're just gonna go right into it so we're gonna slide that in there carefully and I'm going to knit with the working yarn in the back and knit that stitch off carefully slide it off onto the third needle and then I'm gonna knit one more and this is gonna get easier and easier the more rows you do so there's two knit stitches so for the beanie that I'm going to make the bottom part is gonna I'm gonna have a ribbed kind of hem around it a rim around the hat so it's going to be a two by two ribbing so I'm gonna do two knit stitches and now I'm going to purl two stitches to create that ribbing so I'm gonna purl these two stitches now this is where things can get a little more complicated but by all means you can just do straight knitting if you want to or if your lurk just learning for the first time how to do a beanie so in purl one more slide it off so at this point my third knitting needle has way too many stitches on it and I'm running the risk of losing Sam or getting tangled mess here so at this point is where you can introduce your fourth needle so I'm just gonna drop the third needle and introduce this fourth one so here's the next stitch that I need to knit and I'm gonna do the knit stitch for two of them so I'm just going to slide that in and pick up my working yarn that's hanging off the third needle and just carefully knit it through so knit one and knit two and now I'm going to purl two so for the rest of the stitches on this needle I'm just gonna do that same pattern of knit two purl two knit two purl two until I get to the end of the stitches on this needle so finish those last two and I'm just slipping it just slipped off that needle and I have a free needle now the next stitch is that I need to knit are on this needle and as you can see there's kind of a gap here from the first kind of set that I cast it on so what I like to do is before I introduce that fourth needle I like to knit a couple stitches off of the row first just to tighten up that gap just because it can remain a little bit loose if you're going into it with this free needle so I like to take this needle that I just finished I've got the working yarn here and we're just gonna do like we did with the very first needle going to knit two stitches off just to make that gap closed up and become a little tighter so put that in through the loop and knit it off to one and two and I'm also going to purl these next two stitches off two just to further tighten up that gap and I'm all ready now to knit the next two stitches off with this free needle and there's less of a gap now between the two needles here so I'm going to take my free needle here now and knit two stitches and then again for this needle as well I'm just going to knit knit two purl two knit two purl two all the way until I reach the end of the needle there's one purl and if I can get it to pearls now we can go directly into the next one we're almost finished with our first round to stay round instead of row since we're knitting in the round and I'm gonna do what I did right here with this gap I'm going to knit force or knit and purl four stitches first just to kind of close up this gap I have here and I'm going to knit two stitches here pull it tight but not too tight knit and then purl could just knit off those two but I like to do the pearls too just because it's easier to introduce a new needle when you're doing the knit stitch at least for me so that's what I'm doing for but you don't have to do four so that's two pearls and actually what I'm gonna do I forgot since we're back on this first needle that is like way overloaded with stitches I'm going to knit a couple more off just to even it out and kind of share the load here so I'm going to keep knitting maybe you just look for more I think I don't know we'll see you'll find that you're kind of rotating the number of stitches that you have on your needles a lot when you're knitting in the round on double pointed needles but that looks good I think it's now I'm gonna drop that and introduce my free needle here we're almost finished with the round or almost up to the tail of where we first cast it on so we're gonna slip that in there and then again for this needle as well I'm just gonna knit knit two purl two knit two purl two all the way until I reach the end of the needle and my last two stitches before I end this round are the two purl stitches so purl those so one and two and now we've just finished that round but we've still got four stitches on here because these were the first four stitches that we knitted onto that first neat hole if you remember you remember so I'm just gonna to free up this needle I'm gonna knit those off so knit two and then purl two and we've got a free needle now so here's where we're at right now here's the tail end of the yarn we've just finished the second round and here's the working yarn we're ready to just keep going introduce this next needle and just keep going around and around and around as you can tell from how I showed you it doesn't really matter how you divide the stitches amongst your needles you might be someone who likes to keep the same amount of stitches on your needles at all times which is perfectly fine I like to knit a couple stitches first and then introduce the free one just so it doesn't have like any loose bits or anything like that but that's totally not a big deal really it doesn't look like much but it will definitely grow and start to spread and because it's a ribbed pattern it's gonna get kind of stretchy and it'll just look really really nice as you keep going so I'm going to keep knitting and building this up and then I'll check back with you and show you what it looks like [Music] so I've been knitting for a while now I've done well over ten more rows here I think it's about 20 or the almost 20 new rounds and as you can see it's built itself up a lot here and I can really see the knit 2 purl 2 knit 2 purl 2 pattern of the ribbing and so it's a lot easier for me to just visually see where I need to do to pearls where I need to do two knits and it just ends up working a lot of faster so I'm just about to finish this latest round I'm gonna stop after these final two purl stitches and here's what I've gotten so far so this is the rim of the hats the end of the beanie it still doesn't look like it's wide enough for a head but it is these two two by two ribbing it's really really stretchy you can see that's gonna stretch out a lot when you put it over your head so now that I'm done with this base part I'm gonna switch instead of doing my knit two purl two knit two purl two pattern we're just gonna go into straight knitting to create just a plain stuck in a pattern all the way until we're finished with the Hat so I'm beginning my new round here and I'm just gonna dive right in and I'm knitting straight through and this is where it can get really fast so I'm continental knitting right now you can knit however you're comfortable knitting for me this is the fastest method that I know so instead of knitting the knits and purling the pearls we're just knitting everything all the way through and that's gonna slowly start to build up just a plain stockinette stitch all the way I am gonna introduce some stripes with the different colors of yarn that I have so I will show you quickly how I'm doing that once I get to it but otherwise you're just gonna keep doing this until you're ready to finish the Hat and then we'll decrease a little bit and then I'll show you how to finish it off if you want to introduce a stripe or a new color which I'm going to do right now it's very easy you just take your new yarn like this and I'm gonna stuff maybe about six or so inches down there as well and then you're honestly just going to I like to kind of hold the yarn with my index finger to kind of give it just a little bit of slack so it doesn't kind of just come undone you just literally just start knitting with this yarn so I'm going to put it through here and start knitting so that's the easy part we're starting with the blue right there I'm gonna knit all the way around and then I'll show you what I do once I get to the end of this round and I go on to the next round so now I'm coming up I'm about two stitches away from the end of this first round with the blue so I'm going to knit those last two stitches of gray and hold that gray a little tighter and you can see now there's a big gap between the switch here where I switched from the gray to the blue so to close that gap what we're going to do I lied when I said that you weren't gonna need the gray anymore that's actually not true so I'm actually what I did I cut the gray from the rest of the yarn just because I I'm not gonna get back back up and I'm gonna what I do is I wrap the yarn around the light blue so just wrap it around fully one time here you can kind of hold that in your right hand if you want kind of makes it easier then with this first light blue stitch the first stitch in this new round we're going to slip it off purl wise and we're not going to knit it or anything like that so you just take your right knitting needle and you go into it as if you were gonna purl it so you go in like this and you just slip the stitch off without doing any knitting no purling or anything like that you slip it off and then you keep knitting for the rest of the row and it's gonna be kind of loose still but from the back you can kind of work it you'll be able to pull it tighter and eventually as you build up that row you won't have kind of a jagged step in the pattern it'll be kind of a nice straight smooth stripe so I'm going to build up this blue stripe for a little bit and then I'll probably introduce a couple other colors but I won't bother showing you those but each time you switch your colors that's the basic rule for how you introduce a new color of yarn and whenever I'm adding stripes or something to knitting in the round I always do it in the same place so I use you can use a stitch marker if you want to be more careful I just go off of the end of the yarn here so I just know that ok this column of stockinette stitches right here I can just follow this column of stitches all the way up and I know that that is where I should switch to a different color or do whatever I want to do and it will just mean that all of there will there will always be a little tiny noticeable change in the stitches here a little step but keeping them all in the same place will at least make them a little more uniform so now I've done just over 50 rounds and I'm satisfied with how big this is at this point there's enough slack down here that I was able to actually try this on with the needle still on and I know that I'm ready to finish up the Hat the easiest method and it's a pretty popular method is if you take just like a tapestry needle and you use you cut this yarn and you take the tapestry needle and you weave it through so basically just weaving the rest of this yarn through every single one of these loops and then you're taking all of them off the needles and you just pull it tight and that kind of just squeezes the top of the hat together I've never been a fan of that one because sometimes your yarn isn't gonna be that great of a quality and it can easily just break apart when you're pulling it and that can kind of just ruin your whole project so I have never really trusted that method so what I do is I just do a round of decreases and then I knit another round and then I do another round of decreases until I am down to like ten or so stitches and then I'll use the tapestry needle on those ones so on this I'm ready to start my round of decreases and the pattern for this you're just going to knit one and then combine the next two stitches together so I'm going to slip my needle into the next two stitches here and knit those off so knit the next stitch and then knit the next two stitches together so grab the two stitches put my needle through and knit them off knit that one like normal and then knit the next two together knit like normal knit two together this one normal and knit two together and it so I'm just gonna do that for an entire round and I'll meet you back here now I'm back at the beginning of the round and I'm just gonna knit one round that's completely plain knitting the stitches are already really tight so just giving it one round of plain knitting kind of loosens it up and doesn't put quite as much much tension on the stitches now I'm back at the beginning of my round again and I'm gonna do just another round of decreasing every other stitch so knit two together and knit and then knit two together and knit knit two together and knit and I'm gonna do that all the way around again so after that round of decreasing the hole has gotten really small and only have a couple stitches left and from here I mean if you want depending on the type of yarn you have honestly you could just do another round of decrease and keep going until you've pretty much closed the hole for me I'm gonna do one more round of just pulling knitting just to give a little bit more slack because I just I don't trust this yarn that I have I've had bad experiences with this yarn I don't know why I keep using it kind of falls apart on me sometimes but I'm just gonna knit a full round of plain knitting again just to give it some more slack and then I'll do another round of decreasing and then after that round I think we might be done but we'll see so now I've decreased quite a lot on this hat you can see a nice gradual decrease at the top of it I'm down to just ten and I've have it so I've got five stitches left on each needle and I'm just going to take a tapestry needle now and weave in these stitches and weave off your stitches I'm gonna do this terrible method known as the Kitchener stitch which I've gone over a couple times in different videos and I don't think I ever get it exactly right but it's basically a way of just slipping you basically just slip off one stitch slip off the other slip off one stitch slip off the other it's it's a fancy way of doing that and causing as least amount of harm to your project as possible it's mainly a stitch that you would use for like the ends of socks for like the toes just because that's something that's gonna be really noticeable but for a hat especially if you're putting like a pom-pom on the end or something it doesn't really matter how you decide to weave the very bottom part of the Hat so you're gonna be fine just doing whatever pattern you want to when you're weaving but for the curt the Kitchener stitch anyways I'll just explain it real quickly to set it up you have the yarn here over here on the right and we're gonna slip it in to the first stitch as if to purl and pull it through and just leave that stitch on the needle and then in the back we're going to go through and knit that stitch as if you were going to knit it slip it through that stitch as if to knit but don't pull it off yet and so that's the setup and now we're ready to slip the stitches off the needles so for the first one you slip it in as if you're going to knit it so slip it in knit wise and we're gonna pull that stitch off of the needle so you can just slip it off like that give it a tug and then in the front again we're going to slip the needle through the next stitch as if we were going to purl but we're gonna leave that stitch on and now we're gonna go back to the back and we're going to purl the first stitch off so slip that off and purl it and then slip it into the next stitch because if you're going to knit it so slip it in but then leave it on the needle you see how ridiculous this is it's very tedious and confusing so back at the front so we're gonna knit this one off send it off pull that through and then slip it into the next one as if you're going to purl and leave it on for the back you purl this one off so pull that stitch off and then slip it into the next stitch as if to knit but leave it on the needle back in the front I'm going to knit this one off and then slip it on the next one as if to purl and leave it the back we're going to purl this one off and then knit the next one but leave it on back at the front and knit off and then purl and leave it on for the back purl off and then knit the next one and leave it on and then the last one on the front we are just gonna slip it in as if to knit and pull it off and then the last one is the back one purl it off and pull everything tight and we're finished so here's the top of the hat now it's just a nice smooth decrease and because of the magic of the Kitchener stitch you can barely see where the end was woven together so now we've got just this tail end of yarn with your hat inside out just weave it in a couple of these loops you don't have to pull it too tight and now we're done here's the finished Hat I think it looks great if you added multiple colors to yours should be just like a nice solid stripe from mine you can barely see where we switched yarns right here there's just a tiny bit of a jog but it's been minimized because of just a little method we used that I showed you those are all the basics for having it a hat hopefully you feel inspired now to start a new project let me know what you think in the comments below and be sure to LIKE and subscribe as always and I will see you next time

Channel: RJ Knits

Views: 43,083

Rating: 4.927691 out of 5

Keywords: knitting, how to, knit, beanie, cap, hat, how to knit a hat, dpn

Id: Tizml07FNK0

Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 21 2020