Happy Birthday, Cindy!

Time for me to do some more boasting about my hooky creations!

It was my youngest sister’s twenty-second birthday last month and I made her a hat.   This was my first attempt at making a hat for a grown up and I had a lot of fun with it.  I got the pattern off the Lincraft website, it’s called “Angora Beret” (see here).  My sister’s name isn’t ‘Cindy’ by the way, I had such fun creating pseudonyms for my children and husband (I named them after literary characters) that I thought I’d do the same for my siblings (named after our corresponding character in “The Brady Bunch”.  I would be Marcia.)

I spent a lot of time faffing about with the edging.  Everything I tried was either too over-the-top or too plain.  The final product is actually my original design!  It’s very simple (double, treble, picot, treble, repeat), but it came out of my own head!  I’m going to write it up as a proper pattern as I’m sure there’s a raging demand for patterns for lace edging.  Plus, this would seem like more of a legitimate blog if I had some bona fide patterns on it (instead of just boasting about projects and general natterings on)

Cindy, being a very kind sister, promptly plonked the hat on her head and said it would give her true hipster cred.  I didn’t mean for that last sentence to rhyme, but I’m so glad it did.

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Yellow Gumdrop Hat

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you remember this dilemma?  I was not sure if I should go all understated and grown-up with the cream yarn, when really all I wanted to do was get my hands on that rainbow wool and play.  Can you guess which one won?

Of course!  It had to be the rainbow wool!  And it was just so delicious!  Usually I try to use block colours and avoid too much variegated busy-ness, but in this case I just couldn’t resist.  I even put some on the top of the hat, look:

Hmmm.  It’s upside-down.  But that’s OK.  I just did a little experimental hooky and came up with this.  It’s just one round and put together with double crochet (US single) and picot stitches.  Happy to share if anyone’s interested (ooooh! my first original pattern online!)

And here’s my friend’s son, looking decidedly unimpressed with his trendy new acquisition.

I should have made it bigger!  It was a little on the snug side, but my friend loyally protested that it was the perfect size.  At any rate, he makes a very cute little gumnut baby!

On My Hook

One of the things I will be writing about in this blog is my Adventures in Crochet and this is one such post.  I thought I’d share some hooky decisions I had to make today – perhaps you could give me some advice?

So here’s a hat I’m making for my friend’s baby.  I found the pattern for free on Ravelry, called the Elfin Baby Set (see here).  I was very disciplined and used yarn from my ever-growing stash to make it.  I think it needs edging in a contrasting colour to make it more interesting, but not much goes with pale yellow (in my mind at least).  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

So this is cream coloured yarn, very classic, but a little blah.

And this is a lovely rich rainbow yarn – too overpowering?  Do you think I can get away with it?
I’m leaning towards this one, I think.

Now on to problem number two.  And it’s another baby hat.  I’m making this one for a bigger baby – I made her booties initially but made them too small and kept forgetting to give them so now it’s just embarrassing, which is why it’s so super-important that I get this hat right.  In the meantime, I hope the baby’s head doesn’t have some freak growth spurt because that would just make me cry.
This one is called Shell Stitch Beanie and the pattern is by Betsy at The Dainty Daisy.  I made this one with some gorgeous wool I got for a bargain from the Bendigo Wool Mills.  It wasn’t until I started making it, though, that I realised why I got the wool so cheap – and why it was in a bag.  Ladies and Gentlemen, the hat you see before you is the hat that remnants made:

I hope it holds together!  It has that many different bits!  Now here’s my problem.  I want to sew on a cream-coloured flower with a button in the middle and my plan was to use a wooden button (mmm…).  But it turns out there is NO wooden button in my extensive button collection (grrr…).  So here are my other options:

Or I suppose I could drag four children into the not-so-local haberdashery superstore to purchase a single wooden button…

What do you think?