Antarctica Knit Hat Pattern Zoom of East African Horn and Southern Saudi Arabia

I recently finished my Antarctic Hat. This post describes how it was made and publishes the pattern. Since I began by posting the finished hat, I’ll continue to work in reverse order.

The final pattern is seen on the right. Click on it for a full size image. The original pattern is shown below. Annotations on the final are either doodles while I was bored, notes about stitch reduction or type (ocean v. land), or markers to remind me where I was when I took a break from knitting.

For each stitch, I simply looked at the pattern, determined what box I was knitting, and decided if it should be ocean or land, and if it was land if it should be green, brown, or white.

In order to make the pattern I began with with the NASA Blue Marble image, and wrote some image processing code to replace the ocean with white (just to save some ink and have extra space to take notes). I knitted a swatch to determine I wanted X stitches, and then placed X gray boxes evenly across the page. A little bit of extra work was done toward the South Pole in order to have the increases mapped onto the pattern.

My X came out to 108. If you wanted to use this pattern with a slightly different stitch count you can probably just add or remove a few columns from the Pacific and Atlantic basins without much effect on the proportions of the planet.

I chose to begin at the Pole and increase because it allows me to take the hat off the needles and try it on my targeted wearer and then continue knitting if necessary. Beginning at the rim and working up leaves less room for adjustments. The first red line is the equator, and the second was my original estimate of where I would stop. As you can see from the finished product I ended up knitting farther north, and even then adding the white-and-black map border.

Antarctica Knit Hat Pattern

I realize I’ve been calling this the Antarctica Knit Hat but it is really the entire southern hemisphere and almost half of the northern hemisphere. It includes Antarctica, all of Australia, New Zealand, Micronesia, and South America (although I forgot a stitch for the Galapagos), almost all of Central America, Africa, and India, parts of the Arabian Peninsula and Asia, and even a pixel / stitch or two of North America.

I started it a few years ago during my first trip to Antarctica with ANDRILL, and finished it this evening. More posts will come later on the process and the pattern…