Someone in the Knitting Connection, the Middletown knitting group showed me the pattern for these at one of our saturday knit-ins. They are created by knitting a bias fabric parallelagram, joining the ends to form a tube and then tightly gathering one of the ends of the tube together to form a hemisphere.
The first hat was knit from Red Hart Brand acrylic yarn. The second was knit from Lion Brand Jiffy Acrylic Yarn.