I've always wanted to write those "how it was done" posts, and it turns out that today is my lucky day! A few weeks ago, my mum told me about a little place- a shop within a shop- that sells beautiful wool and embroidery yarns and such, and she knew I would find stuff I liked there. Well, I did, but in the end I only bought one ball of wool (double knit, 100g) because I am terrified of making a mess of things, and I wanted to make sure I'd produce something useful. More often than not, I will buy something for crafting, and it will end up in a drawer somewhere, or partially used because I was not as good at {insert craft} as I thought I was.
Well, yesterday I looked at the wool, and thought about the money I spent on it, and decided to make something. Initially I thought about making a scarf, because I want to own a million infinity scarves, but then I thought about how the beanies I buy are usually too small for me and my afro, and I have often thought about making myself a slouchy beanie like one sees online. So I went to Friend Google, and found this, and this.
I have no patience for following patterns except when I'm learning, and I was reasonably confident I could come up with something. So for my foundation, I did a double chain stitch (dch), which I learnt how to do here. I kept putting it on my head to see if I had it long enough, which is definitely one way to do things. I decided to make it continuous, and so I did circular crochet, rather than a band to join later. (In fact, I did not break my yarn until I had joined up the top of the hat, which is very cool!). I continued with single crochet until I thought the band was a reasonable width.
Fun times. Then I had to decide on a fancy pattern, and I quite liked the puff stitch I saw when I was doing research. I inherited two crochet dictionaries- invaluable things!!- and have been practicing stitches from there. There is a stitch called pineapple stitch in there which looks enough like the puff stitch mentioned in one of the links above that I think it may be the same thing. So that's the stitch I decided to go with.
The only tricky bit was deciding how to start new rows, but I decided to do 2 ch. and that worked out fine. Here's my progress with the pineapple stitch. The only thing I would do differently is to be more careful with my stitches, as some of them were quite loose, and it shows.
So after ages and ages of struggling with double knit wool and a 3mm hook, I joined the top with slip stitches, bringing things together in a star pattern. I found that pretty easy, and the result is not bad at all. So this is the final product, which this nice old man was willing to model for me:
It was a lot of fun, and took only an afternoon to do, with a decent result. It's the reason I prefer crochet to knitting :)
0 comments :
Post a Comment