I bought this pattern from Etsy seller Lavanya Paricella, here.

I had never brioche knit before, but this pattern was easy to follow. It turns out, with brioche you knit the same stitch again with a second color. Lavanya’s pattern accomplishes that by having you knit all the way around the hat in Color A (black in my case), using yarn-overs, and then all the way around in Color B (muted teal). With each round, you knit together the yarn-overs from the previous one and also make new yarn-overs in the current color. This is no harder than doing colorwork where you carry the yarn over, and in many ways it’s easier.

I have seen hints that some brioche patterns have you knit the two colors successively as you go around (or maybe that is something you need to do when brioche knitting flat, since otherwise your two yarn balls would end up on opposite ends of the piece). Anyway, I still have a lot to learn, but I consider this experiment successful.

When you read about brioche, you’ll read that it’s “twice as thick” as regular knitting. I wouldn’t say it’s quite twice as thick, especially if we are comparing it to cables, but it is certainly thicker, plushier, and stretchier. It creates a reversible fabric, where one side is that houndstooth type pattern you see above, and the other side looks like a rib knit, with Color B standing forward and Color A in the background. (This particular hat has garter stitch above the brioche.)

I bought this pattern because it had the look I was seeking for a hat I wanted to gift to a certain nephew. Now that I’ve seen how fast it knits up and how well it shows off a color story, I can’t wait to knit this pattern with all kinds of other color combinations!

The pattern comes in two weights: fingering weight yarn (very fine), and DK yarn (normal, medium yarn). I used DK on this pattern because a) that’s what I had on hand and b) I wanted to finish quickly in time for the birthday. The fingering-weight version looks even better in the pictures, because as you can imagine, it has a finer pattern. I want to try it sometime, but for now, DK is just fine. I happened to have a ball of black and a ball of pale teal, both of them wool blends, so apart from buying the pattern (very affordable), this hat was “free.”

Here are some different ways to wear it.