How Every Beanie Gets Made: Inside the Edgehill Crafts Workshop
One person. One workshop. Every single beanie.
When you order a beanie from Edgehill Crafts, it doesn't come from a shelf. It doesn't ship from a warehouse. I make it — usually within a day or two of your order landing — in my workshop in Banbury, Oxfordshire.
Here's exactly how that happens.
Step 1: The Sentro Machine
I knit every beanie on a Sentro circular knitting machine. If you've not seen one, it's a hand-cranked circular loom — I feed the yarn, I turn the crank, and the machine pulls the stitches through row by row. It's not automated. Every revolution is manual, which means I'm physically present for every centimetre of fabric.
Each beanie takes roughly 45–60 minutes on the machine alone, depending on the weight of yarn and the colourway. For multi-colour designs — stripes, gradients, school colours — the machine has to be paused and re-threaded each time the colour changes.
Step 2: Choosing the Yarn
I use non-itchy yarn blends specifically because I want these beanies to actually be worn. There's no point making something scratchy that ends up in a drawer. The yarn has to be soft enough for all-day wear, warm enough to earn its keep in a British winter, and durable enough to survive the washing machine.
The colour range currently sits at around 60 colourways — everything from classic navy and oatmeal through to brighter shades for school and sports team custom orders.
Step 3: Hand-Finishing
Once the knitting is done, every beanie is finished by hand. That means:
- Casting off and securing the yarn ends
- Turning and folding the double layer — Edgehill beanies are fully reversible, so both sides need to look right
- Checking the tension and shaping
- A final inspection before it goes in the bag
No two beanies are identical in the way a machine-pressed product would be. There's natural variation in handmade work, and I think that's a feature, not a bug.
Why I Don't Outsource
I get asked occasionally whether I plan to scale — get a bigger operation, hire people, move to a faster machine. The honest answer is no, at least not in a way that changes this process.
The reason the beanies are good is because I make them. The quality control isn't a department — it's me, at the end of every hat, deciding whether it's good enough to send. That's not something you can outsource without changing the product entirely.
Edgehill Crafts exists because I wanted to make things properly. That's still the point.
Custom Orders
If you're after a specific colour combination — school colours, team colours, something you can't see in the shop — get in touch. Custom colourways are one of my favourite parts of the job.
Every beanie. One maker. Made in Banbury.