Sunday, June 14, 2015

Knots of Love

This weekend I had a chance to make two hats for Knots of Love, a charity which collects and distributes handmade chemo caps and hats to those undergoing chemotherapy or facing other illnesses. I meant to make one, but crochet goes so quickly that I ended up doing two!


The thing with crochet and me is, I am terrible at following patterns, and even worse about tracking the ones I make up as I go. I just go by a basic structure of a crocheted hat, like so:
  1. Crochet a circle, increasing at regular intervals, until the circle is the appropriate size for the top of the hat.
  2. Crochet in the round, without increasing, until the body of the hat is long enough.
This is usually good enough for making bowls and hats and other round objects, but there tends to be a lot of frogging and redoing to get the right shape.

The first one I made started out as a hat with a brim, but I tried to get fancy and make a half brim, just at the front. This is why it flips out a bit on the right:


You can see it a bit better in this photo, where I stuck the hat on a bowl:


The hat is half-double-crochet all around (half-treble crochet if you're in the UK). I would also like to note that the bowl is far smaller than an adult head, and I promise that the hats look much better on a real person than flattened or stuffed with other items.

Here's how I formed the front brim:
  1. Flatten the hat with the start of the round in the centre.
  2. Mark the side edges of the flattened hat, using locking or split stitch markers. 
  3. Increase in every second stitch between the new stitch markers, on the side without the start of round marker.
  4. Crochet around, no increases.
  5. Repeat step 3.

The second hat I made is a basic cloche. It's single crochet around (UK: double crochet), but I added a small textured band of half double crochet (UK: half-treble crochet), stitching in the back loop to make the little ridge.



Also added this supcer cute flower!


These hats are going to be sent to a lady at work who is organizing a collection drive, and I'm fairly pleased with how they turned out. I hope they are able to bring a smile to somebody who needs it!

I'm also very pleased with the photography setup I did for these pictures. I was reading this post on pins from Stonemountain and Daughter, and realized I could use fabric as a backdrop–I certainly have lots of that around! This lace is left over from my knit & lace top.

I'm just learning new skills all of the time! Next I think it might be time to learn tatting. ;)

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