Cast On, Cast Back S01EP05: WoollyWormhead on Hat Architecture, Neurodivergent Making & Quiet Rebellion

Why a sideways-knitted hat can say more about resistance, identity, and community care than you’d ever expect.

Where to Find Woolly Wormhead

You’ll find Woolly Wormhead’s work in the curves and angles of hats that refuse to sit politely in the world - pieces that twist, tilt, and spiral with the logic of an engineer and the spirit of a quiet rebel. Their patterns live in the hands of knitters across the globe, in Ravelry queues and well-worn project bags, and in the conversations between makers who love a challenge stitched with intention.

Woolly’s design studio exists partly online and partly in the physical landscapes they inhabit - from community workshops and mutual-aid projects to the digital spaces where the Woolly Hat Society gathers. There, you’ll see experiments in structure, reflections on accessibility, and the gentle, stubborn insistence that creativity can be ethical.

And if you ever spot them at a fibre festival or teaching session, they’re likely the one sketching out a new form - a sideways construction, a rebellious crown - quietly testing how far a single strand of wool can bend without breaking its integrity.

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Today we’re casting on with someone who treats knitting not as decoration or filler or the soft domestic sigh it’s so often miscast as, but as a form of architecture - rebellious, engineered, sculpted. A field built on the radical belief that form does not have to behave. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, this was once an actual moniker given to Woolly: the hat architect.

I love that. A title both exact and slightly mischievous, like something you’d find in an old guild ledger between “maker of intricate buttons” and “spinner of improbable twines.” But for Woolly, it wasn’t a branding decision. It simply emerged. The people who knit Woolly’s work looked at those patterns - those impossible angles, the ways crowns bloom sideways, the soft geometry that seems to shrug at convention - and said, oh, you’re designing like an architect. And so the name stuck.

What strikes me most is how naturally all of this sits together in Woolly’s life: the electronic engineering background, the sculptural fine art textiles degree, the years spent teaching art textiles in South East London. You can hear the Venn diagram clicking into place as Woolly talks. Hatmaking, for Woolly, isn’t a cute corner of knitting; it is the perfect marriage of every space Woolly’s brain feels at home in. The logical loops of circuitry. The way binary mirrors stitches - yes/no, knit/purl, open/closed. The sculptural instinct to turn cloth into structure. The engineering need for systems that behave, formulas that don’t collapse when stretched across a human skull.

“I think in 3D,” Woolly says. “It’s just where my brain sits quite happily.”

Meanwhile mine - well. My brain does not work in hats. I once set three separate small fires during a millinery module at university simply by attempting to block Sinamay. Some people walk into a studio and emerge with a perfect towering parade hat. I walk in and accidentally summon the fire brigade. We can’t all shine in every fibre discipline.

Woolly laughs when I tell that story, because the designer had the opposite experience. That millinery section during Woolly’s own studies? Woolly was utterly in that element. “Great big sculptural hats I’d made everywhere,” Woolly says, and I feel a pang of envy so strong I could chew a feathered fascinator.

But what’s interesting - what keeps pulling me back as Woolly talks - is that this isn’t just about skill. It’s about how we imagine the boundaries of a thing. We each carry an internalised sense of what a hat should be, and Woolly’s is simply wider, stranger, more curious than most. “As long as it fits around the brim,” Woolly insists, “it can go in any direction.” This feels less like a comment about accessories and more like a tiny manifesto.

Because even in the technical talk - logic gates echoing stitch structures, continuous formulas ensuring clean geometry, there’s something else humming underneath. The quiet rebellion of doing a deeply familiar thing in a way that refuses the default route. Where others write patterns that travel vertically toward the crown, Woolly writes sideways. Where others favour predictable decreases, Woolly experiments with unexpected shaping. Where others emphasise simple beanies with light texture, Woolly wanders off into a forest of colourwork, angles, and shapes that shouldn’t make sense but absolutely do.

And yet, even after twenty years of this, Woolly often feels like designing on a different planet. The average hat pattern out there remains enormously conservative. Same shapes. Same stitches. Same soft dip into trend-led minimalism. Beige as a worldview.

I ask Woolly whether this sideways thinking feels like a form of rebellion. Woolly doesn’t hesitate. Not the sideways knitting itself, Woolly clarifies, but the approach. The refusal to accept that we only get one hat silhouette. The insistence that it can be warm, practical, and structurally interesting. That it can be colourful without apology. That it can look like fun, even on a grown-up.

You’d think, by now, this would be commonplace. Woolly has influenced the field - an early slouch hat from 2006 was considered “off the wall” at the time, which makes me laugh because slouch hats have since become the unofficial uniform of teenagers from the 2010s everywhere. But despite the workshops and the evangelising, sideways construction remains niche. Even other designers admit they’re intimidated. Hats are, after all, one of the most three-dimensional things we wear, and not everyone thinks in sculptural terms. Some want their hats to blend in. Some want their knitting to behave. Some are scared of colour. (My favourite moment: Woolly’s incredulity that adults, actual adults, think playful hats are for children.)

I ask why people cling so hard to the standard shapes. Woolly is patient with it. Some brains just don’t think in curves and angles. Some knitters worry about “wearability,” that cursed word. And some, Woolly suggests, are simply anxious about stepping outside trend-led expectations. Beige minimalism has declared itself morally superior, after all: slow fashion, but make it Instagram-friendly. The yarn equivalent of saying “I don’t shop fast fashion” while quietly recreating Zara’s most recent drop.

When Woolly says there ought to be less beige, it’s with the energy of someone who has spent far too long in yarn shops full of mushroom-coloured Scandinavian “quiet luxury.” There’s a difference, Woolly notes, between someone genuinely loving neutrals and someone following them to fit in. Trend-following, Woolly says, is “one step away from fast fashion,” and I swear I felt something click in my chest. That soft beige knitting aesthetic so often gets framed as virtuous- practical, sustainable, minimal. But it’s still a trend that still dictates sameness, and it still discourages all the bright, ridiculous, personal things knitting can be.

This is where Woolly’s work feels most radical to me. Not in the mathematics (although Woolly’s brain does maths I can only point at from afar like a confused Victorian), and not in the sculptural instinct. It’s in the invitation to play. Woolly’s scrap designs, for instance: structured enough for the maths to behave, but loose enough that knitters can throw in flashes of randomness. “I do all the hard work,” Woolly says, “so you can go and play.” That feels like a form of care.

But of course, creativity always comes with a cost. When I ask how Woolly protects energy, the answer is the kind of honesty I wish more designers would feel able to say out loud: Woolly doesn’t. Not very well. Not with the pressure of being the family’s sole income. Not with the weight of disability. Not with the reality of self-employment. Woolly talks about autistic burnout - deep, bone-level exhaustion - but also the impossibility of simply stepping back when you’re the one keeping everything afloat.

It’s a strangely grounding moment. Because for all the talk about structure and rebellion and colour and form, this is how many craft careers actually look: creatively exhilarating, financially precarious, emotionally draining. And yet Woolly keeps designing hats that tilt the world a little off its axis. Keeps teaching. Keeps nudging knitters away from beige conformity and into something more joyful, more sculptural, more theirs.

I think that’s why the “hat architect” label resonates so much. Architecture isn’t just building. It’s imagining how shape meets need. How structure meets personality. How a form can hold a self.

And hats - at least in Woolly’s hands - aren’t just things to keep us warm. They’re small rebellions. Little wearable sculptures and quiet arguments for colour, for play, for making things that don’t blend in. Things that sit around the brim, yes, but also give you room to breathe.

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🎧 Listen to the full episode of Cast On, Cast Back with Woolly Wormhead wherever you get your podcasts.

Explore Woolly’s work, from inventive hat designs to workshops that invite knitters to play, experiment, and think sideways.

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