Friday, December 31, 2010

Making Hats...

Hello, Readers!

It has been quite a bit from my last post. The year has come and gone and so have many new crochet projects. I am not sure how much yarn I have gone through. I know I have two afghans in progress (one star shaped and the other a scrap-ghan). I have made so many scarves and have discovered the beauty of cowls. I am definitely expanding my crochet knowledge and having a blast while doing it. I apologize to all my readers who started following what seemed to be a blog I was never going to forget to wondering where the cobwebs and dust bunnies came from. Well - hopefully 2011 will bring about a bit of change in that. My only sadness with this blog is that I specifically made it for crochet - and not other crafts.... and I've been painting like a crazed lady as of recent.

Anywho... let's get back to Crochet. I'll worry about that other stuff later.

I have a new love for the "I Love This Yarn" brand of yarn. For such a low price you get a quality yarn that is pretty soft and versatile. The color choices are awesome too. My new favorite color is "oatmeal" which is a light tan with flecks of browns and blues.

I have also been a bit crazed about making hats the last couple weeks. This is one of my favorites:
Blue Bobble Beret

I was looking for free patterns online and found a pattern for the bobble beret:

Link HERE

The website is called "Patterns by Dot" - Dot shares a lot of patterns and all are pretty well written. She is another blogspot blogger so please, do give her credit for a great pattern and enjoy her other offerings.

I will say her explanation of how to do the "bobble" was a little confusing. Basically I figured it out (or translated it as...) as this: to do 1 bobble stitch, YO and put your hook through the stitch, YO and pull a loop through (leaves 3 loops on your hook the first time through). YO and pull through 2 of the loops (leaves 2 loops on the hook). Now, instead of finishing off the stitch as a double crochet, YO and put your hook through the same stitch again. YO and draw a loop through. YO and pull through the first three loops on the hook ... repeat this so you have done 5 partial stitches in the same stitch. After the 5th partial stitch, you will have 6 loops on the hook. YO and pull through all 6 loops. Do a single chain stitch to lock the bobble stitch in place.

Now, another thing that kinda "got" me in the pattern is that when you do the row of single crochet's after your bobble row, you will actually come up with a LOT more than 60 stitches. You cannot blindly stitch otherwise you will have increased your hat size by almost double! What I did was for the single crochet row, I would do a single crochet above all the double crochets and then a single crochet in the locking chain stitch of every bobble. This means you will be skipping every 3rd stitch in the bobble row. I had extra stitches and I'm not sure why. Perhaps I was doing the bobble wrong, but in the end, as you can see in the picture, my hat turned out pretty darn good. It only took me about an hour and a half to two hours to complete. It was a pretty good project that went fast. It would make a great gift.

I'd be interested to know if I didn't do the pattern right.... Dot? You there? hehehe

So that is a bit of an overview of a free pattern that I got through and wanted to share the results and my interpretations of the pattern. If you have a pattern you'd like me to try, I'll give it a shot!

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