2 Stash-Busting Free Knitted Hat Patterns

With basic skills and these easy free knitted hat patterns, you can use up your leftover skeins of yarn and create one-of-a-kind knitted hats. The great thing about hats? They work for all ages and genders!

Head over to the handmade gifts page for more great gift ideas!

If you’ve knitted or crocheted for any length of time, then you know all about a “yarn stash.”

While some of your stash yarn may have been bought for a project you haven’t done yet, a lot of it is leftover yarn. It’s the last skein, or part of a skein, you have from completed projects.

Also, I don’t know about you, but my stash can also grow from purchasing yarn on sale that I never really found a project for (even though it seemed like the perfect yarn at the time, lol).

My family has joked about the yarn stored all over the house – so finding ways to use it up is a very good thing.

Which is why the year I was able to use up most of my leftover yarn by knitting hats for all the kids in my family – nieces, nephews, and my kids – for Christmas gifts was a banner year.

Can I tell you how much I loved this – using up what I had (no waste) and giving a gift they liked (and hopefully used) that was handmade, for ZERO dollars? *Insert all the heart eyes here*

Easy Knitted Hat Patterns

Even though I have knitted sweaters, throws, and many scarves, among other things, I have only knitted one hat in my life before this – and it didn’t turn out all that great.

So believe me when I tell you the two patterns that I found for these gifts were e.a.s.y. with basic stitches and shaping.

In fact, once I got it down, I could finish a hat in just a few hours of TV watching so these went pretty quickly, too.

This is a beginner project for sure, though maybe after you’ve completed your first scarf (that everyone seems to start with) and you’ve got your tension even.

I used the ribbed pattern above for only two hats, since the other basic hat pattern I show here seemed to produce a nicer hat that worked well with all the different yarns I had.

TIP: I kept to wool and wool blend yarns, and made sure to check my gauge since I was using different yarns than the patterns call for. If you are using different colors to create stripes like in my examples, then you’ll want to match the material of the yarn as well as it’s gauge (DK, Worsted, etc.).

Click through the links below to grab the free patterns, get your stash together, and start dreaming up ideas of color ways and patterns.

And have fun!

Don’t knit?

There’s a really cool crocheted beanie in this list of crochet gift ideas!

This is part of 31 days of handmade gifts for the holidays and beyond. Click here to see all the projects in this series.