Paul Cable Knit Hat
Doimhneacht

In 2012, when we first started out (I know), if it wasn’t for cable knit hats, I would probably still be sat in a phone shop in Burnley trying to sell clothes whilst sitting in my childhood bedroom surrounded by boxes, saying to my mum, whilst eating tea, “This next release will be the big one, Mum.”

Anyway, luckily for my mum, my family and my clothing brand aspirations, you lot bought things and now I don’t need to sell Samsung Galaxies to anyone. A relief for us all… I digress.

Our Paul cable knit hats are based on the exact hats that we made way back in the day and were named after my dear friend Paul from S.E.H Kelly, as he was the first person I ever saw wearing one of these in real life. They are based on the hats that were huge in Japan at the turn of the 21st century and were more or less impossible to get in the UK, even though they were made here!!!

The hats come in a chunky knit that suits all shapes and sizes of heads, even a massive head like mine. They are lovingly knitted in the UK by Jason and his team in the Midlands, who have been manufacturing hats for us more or less since day one. Yet another group of lovely people who were willing to take a risk on us back in the day.

The hats are made from beautiful, genuine 100% wool Donegal tweed yarn that has been shorn, blended, carded and spun in Donegal. There are lots of people and brands out there pretending to have Donegal wool in their items, but pressure them and it soon becomes clear that they’ve never even had a boxty, let alone sourced their yarns from Donegal. Those rascals!

This hat comes in the Doimhneacht colour, which is a beautiful deep navy blue with little flecks of light blue and heather running through it. Doimhneacht is a lovely Irish word meaning ‘depth’, and when you consider the enormous Atlantic Ocean that crashes against the coastline of Donegal, I think it’s a rather fitting name. The different colours in the yarn remind me of looking out to sea on a particularly moody day, when the water is dark blue, the sky is doing its own thing and there’s a very good chance you’re about to get absolutely soaked. Luckily, you’ve got a lovely woolly hat on your head. Every cloud, eh?

No bobble, no fuss, just a wonderful hat that will last years and years. It may even make you think about visiting the north-west coast of Ireland or what you were doing in 2012. So, in some ways, it is a time machine.

100% Donegal wool.