About two and a half years ago my brother’s girlfriend Michelle reached out to me. She works as a costumer and shopper in Hollywood, dressing characters in movies and shows like Death Wish, The Morning Show, and All Rise, for example. She had gotten a job on this exciting movie with some big-name celebs, they needed some hand-knit items, and she thought of me! So cool! The items needed were specifically Santa Hats.
Spoiler to get the links in here up front: This resulted in my new Red Nick’s Fancy Hat free pattern, on payhip here and on ravelry here!
They needed two different kinds of hats, and the costume designers for the movie designed approximately how they wanted them to look. It was too much work for just me, so I took on the colorwork hat, and enlisted my buddy Jessica (Insomnia Knitting) to do the more casual ribbed hat (Rustic Red One; ravelry link). We each needed to provide four hats for the movie, and for the complex colorwork one that was too much for my hands to manage in the time allowed, so my other knitting friend Anna jumped on board to knit two of my pattern.
Once we were all on board for the project, we got the details figured out, which involved a lot of swatching and back-and-forth with the movie designers to make yarn and pattern decisions. I gave them lots of ideas for yarns…
…and, for my hat, they decided on a subtle red-on-red tweed look, landing on Provincial Tweed in darker red for the main color, and Swish merino in a slightly lighter red for the contrasting color. Classy Santa.
So I finalized the colorwork pattern and we knit all the hats! At some point in the process, we learned more about the movie—that our hats would be worn by JK Simmons as Santa!
Very exciting. And then we learned that it was some kind of wild action-comedy-Christmas movie also starring The Rock and Chris Evans. It was so fun starting to see photos of our hats popping up on Dwayne Johnson’s instagram feed!!
Then a lot of time passed (this was all in summer through fall of 2022). Finally, earlier this year, the movie was scheduled for release this November, and the trailer came out. And then posters, and merch even! JK’s main hat (in all the marketing stuff) is Jessica’s ribbed pattern, and it’s so fun and wild to see her hat on action figures!
My hat is the one in the trailer with the fur trim, so you can’t really see the actual hat hardly at all but I’m reeeally hoping you can see it in the movie! I think the ribbed one is his everyday Santa hat, and my fancy fur-lined one is like his Christmas-Night/special-occasion look.
So then once the movie was on the horizon, I knit up a new sample of the pattern with higher-contrast yarns, and I put it into a pdf for you!
It’s a free pattern and the colorwork is just charts. It’s just the one size but some notes are included for adjusting your gauge to customize the size. The yarns used are worsted that leans light, DK-ish, and it’s worked at a tight gauge, so DK yarn should also work, especially if you want your hat not quite so big.
Yardage requirements don’t include the pom-pom, which could be a store-bought faux-fur style, or could be made using stash yarn or leftovers or a combination. My pom-pom was actually made with the dark red Provincial Tweed from the movie version of the hat, a yarn which isn’t used in my pattern sample. The pattern sample flips the main and contrasting yarns, using the Swish as the MC and the Provincial Tweed in the Cream color as the CC.
I love that Jessica’s hat pattern includes tons of custom sizes and notes for making it your own, plus the stretchy ribbing makes it even more versatile, so it’s a great gift hat option! So whether you want a quicker custom knit or a fancy colorwork piece, you can wear the same hat as JK Simmons this holiday season! So weird!
Oh btw side note, this free pattern pdf is in my new pattern template that I’m juuuust starting to roll out. So far I’ve updated a few other free patterns—Blur, Scant, and Waving Chevrons Scarf—plus Swivel (those are payhip links, ravelry links: Blur, Scant, Waving Chevrons Scarf, Swivel). I’m still kinda getting things figured out but I do plan to update a lot of my old patterns, especially ones that aren’t part of collections/ebooks, into the new template, over time.
For some of my old paid patterns, I also plan to knit new samples and kinda upgrade them, and probably raise the prices at that point, but anyone who bought the older version of the pattern will get the update. That’ll be a 2025 thing, but just letting you know now!
And I’ll leave you with one more shot of Jessica and I laughing at how wild this whole movie hat thing is!!
Lee Does Stuff 