‘Hazy Alpaca’ crochet hat

After quite a bit of unpicking and re-doing (originally thought I was making a ‘top hat’ sort of shape, then a beret, but then finally what you see here), I’ve finished the hat I promised Pixie as a justification for buying the Glastonbury yarn. grin

The ‘Hazy Alpaca’ hat is double-crocheted in circles, increasing as necessary to make it the right shape, and I sized the hat for an adult because Pixie is growing very quickly and she gets upset when she grows out of things I have made for her.

Once the final incarnation of the hat was underway, I had developed the plan of making it look like the crochet had been done in vertical sections and then stitched together with the Kidsilk Haze. In reality, that would have been hard to achieve without a pattern because I would probably have ended up with an misshapen hat once it had all been sewn together! So… I started at the top of the head and then simply worked around in circles (not spirals), changing colour as necessary. This meant that I wouldn’t waste any yarn by leaving long ends, or have a screaming fit if I had to unravel some of the work because it wasn’t shaping properly!

Thus, the Inca Cloud colour blocking was done by dropping the current yarn and picking up the next one to change colour. At the end of each circuit, I chained three stitches and turned the work to pick up the right colour yarns as I came back the other way. To rotate the colours, I just crocheted on with the same colour I was using, passing passed by the colour I would normally have picked up. I passed the second colour up past the rows for which it wasn’t needed, and it seemed to work out OK because all the row-skipping yarn was passed up on the inside of the hat where it wasn’t obvious. I don’t know if this was the right way of handling the colour aspect, but it was certainly the simplest plan I could up with.

Once I was finished with the alpaca and all the ends were tucked in, I double-crocheted up the ‘seams’ with the Kidsilk Haze and then ran some more of it around the brim. Incidentally, I noticed the Inca Cloud yarn was slightly fatter/woollier in the Fuchsia than it was in the other two shades, but it doesn’t seem obvious when the hat is being worn. Texture-wise, I noticed a nice synergy between the Kidsilk Haze and Fuchsia Inca Cloud that suggested they’d like to get felty together. I might put them together again, as I have a good amount of each left over.

Oh, and I must mention the lovely tablecloth you can see here. We call it the Easter tablecloth because that’s when we use it most, but my mother used to bring it out on Sundays for tea when I was a little girl. It’s the most wacky design – lots of sunny yellow fish in silhouette on a bright white background. Completely crazy, but utterly fab!

Entry plonked in Crochet @ 9:48 pm
Tagged thusly: artesano alpaca, artesano inca cloud, Crochet, crochet hat, rowan kidsilk, rowan yarn