Accidental Genius + 11 Ponytail Free Knit Hat Patterns

Have you ever had a knitting project go completely wrong? This is exactly what happened to Danica Lause when she attempted her first winter hat knitting pattern. The hat didn’t come out as expected; in fact, the finished product had a big hole in the back that she had somehow mistakenly created. After finding the mistake, Danica tossed the project aside in frustration. Eventually, someone convinced her to try the hat on and they quickly discovered that the hole was a convenient gap for her favored ponytail hairstyle. Ponytail knit hats were born!

“Looking back, I can’t believe I wore that in public, because it was pretty shabby and ridiculous,” Lause said in an interview with BizTimes Milwaukee.

Despite the hat being “shabby and ridiculous” she continued to wear it, and kept getting questions on where others could get their own ponytail hat. She quickly realized the business potential and got to work, refined her design, and has made a full time job making hats from her accidental knitting mistake. Check out this great collection of ponytail knit hats from some of our favorite bloggers around the internet:

We happen to think this was a particularly genius mistake to have made. Here at AllFreeKnitting, we live in an area where hats are a necessity for many months each year, and laments about the ponytail can often be heard. Let’s face it, there just isn’t a comfortable and stylish way to wear a knit hat when you have a ponytail, so ponytail knit hats are a total game changer.

It appears that we aren’t the only ones who wish for better hats to wear with our ponytails. We’ve collected some of our favorite free knitting patterns from around the internet that feature the now infamous hole to let your ponytail fly free and still have a snuggly hat on your head. This collection of great free knit hat patterns from some of our favorite bloggers is sure to feature a warm hat you’d love to wear.  All are easy to knit and feature fun ways to incorporate the ponytail feature into the design.

Of course, these holes were purposefully added, but you could potentially take any knit hat pattern and make a mistake… err… add a design element to let your ponytail out of the confines of the hat.