A bit of crochet for a change

A few weeks ago I was showing some of my students a felted crochet bag I designed. It is a bucket shaped bag and one of the ladies put it on her head as a hat for a joke. It worked quite well apart from being rather deep; a good hat for Marge Simpson! but it did give me an idea.

Last week I thought I would play around with this crochet idea and designed a chullo hat using crochet and Rowan Colourscape yarn. The hat design is very simple as i started at the crown with a ring of chains and then increased out until I thought the centre crown section was big enough. i then changed to a shell stitch pattern for the rest of the hat working in a circle initially and then back and forth for the ear flaps.

I tried the hat on as I went and had to undo some bits a couple of times before I got what I felt was a well fitted shape but I was quite pleased with the end result and it only took a few hours to work out.

With the success of this first hat I then went on to crochet a cap which was in fairly basic stitches, double crochet, trebles and chain mesh stitch

It is crocheted in Rowan Colourscape again which gives the gradual colour change and is worked from the centre of the crown outwards. Again I kept trying on the hat while I was making it to see how well it fitted. I did have to undo some chain rows but as crochet is very easy to undo it didn't cause any problems and again only took a few hours to make.

Having got into the swing of things I had another go at making the cap with mesh stitch edging but using a DK yarn this time. i happen to have some Elle Escapade so decided to use that although generally I don't like using acrylic yarn but it did work up very easily so here are some more pictures.