Thursday, March 9, 2017

spiral cloche hat

Someone posted a picture of some cute little girl hats and it sent me searching for the pattern so I could try it. There are numerous patterns out there for spiral hats like the one I was interested in, but I found this video which was quite nice and thought I'd share it (and the resulting hat) in case others are interested. She has a print pattern as well.

Here is the print pattern.  


The video can be found at YouTube hereThere are three parts. Two by Louise at Red Haired Amazona (I love her accent) and one by Off the Hook for the brim. There's a bit of background noise in the first two but I did not find it too distracting. Her instructions were clear and I just paused the video to catch up if I needed to.

She does note that she originally saw the pattern on a Russian site. I don't speak Russian. However she does have a lot of pictures. 


I grabbed one of the extra skeins of Knit Picks Brava Sport arylic in solstice heather that I had on hand to try this out. I used a G hook for my sample. It came out pretty large and I didn't do as many rounds as she did. Maybe it's meant not to be too tight since it has the brim? If I made another I would use fingering yarn and a smaller hook.

The video shows a cotton 8 ply. She suggests a 2.5mm hook.

If you can make a front post dc, this won't be too difficult. Just follow along and pay attention to what you're doing, particularly the location of the ch-1s.

I decided I didn't want a wide brim because the hat was large and I wanted to make it small enough to fit my head by reducing the stitches. So I have a flat brim. Here is the result.


The Solstice Heather is too dark to show you the stitch definition. With a lighter yarn you'd be able to see the spirals better. It's a pretty nice hat and was not difficult to make following her video.

My female mannequin has some stickiness on it which I've been unable to remove fully. Still working on that. Then she will become my go-to model again. :-)

Happy crocheting!
Sandie

Monday, March 6, 2017

2016 tempghan through May

Here is the 2016 temperature afghan through May. This is the last month I can complete until Knit Picks restocks the paprika. Hopefully they won't push the date back any further than April 4. Besides the paprika I wanted eggplant for the one row in the 30s.



You can see there are now quite a few rows of yellow and orange. The next few months will get into more orange and paprika with some red.

Just as a reminder, here are the temperature and color guidelines.

30s eggplant (1)
40s mulberry (1)
50s freesia (25)
60s cornflower (35)
70s marina (40)
75-79 tranquil (51)
80-84 Grass (52),
85-89 canary (42)
90-91s orange (50)
93-95 paprika (46)
96-99 red (23)

100 caution (1)

It will be about six weeks or so before I can work on this again. Hopefully I won't lose momentum when the yarn comes round.

In the meantime, I have a few things I'm looking at. One is a hat that is about half done. I also have a lapghan I started some time ago that I can pull out. A few things came up this week that I am thinking on as well. We'll see which way the wind blows tomorrow. :-)

Happy crocheting!
Sandie