Some Hats for my Brother

My hat model Vena is back, and this time she's modeling some hats I made for my brother!



But first, check this other hat that has nothing to do with my brother:


I used two different kinds of yarn for this. It looks like I used a pink yarn and a purple yarn, but actually I used a purple yarn around the base and a purple/pink variegated yarn for the top. Yeah. Like you care, right?



Actually, although I think it looks ok, I'm unsatisfied with this hat for a few reasons.

The first is that the pattern just plain sucked. The hat is actually supposed to have a puffy little pom-pom thing on the top, but when I tried to make it the pattern was so confusing that the resulting mess looked less like a pom-pom than like a purple and pink crocheted booger. The picture included with the pattern was no help since the hat was photographed from an angle that didn't show the pom-pom. I didn't have a clue how I was supposed to attach that to the top of the hat and make it look ok, so I left it off and I think the hat is better for it.

Secondly, this town is crap for buying yarn in. The hat required sport weight yarn, and the only sport weight yarn I could find was in baby colors. I didn't really want a purple and pink baby-colored hat, but there wasn't much I could do about it. The worst part was when I asked the girl in the yarn section at Jo-Ann's if they had any sport weight yarn and her reaction was pretty much, "Spore...t waaaait?" It's a pretty basic yarn size, and it's somewhat disheartening when the person who works at one of your key yarn suppliers has never heard of it. I believe it's possible to buy non-baby sport weight yarn in this town now, in Wal-Mart of all places, but it's been a while since I've needed to buy any so I could be wrong about that.

Finally, the hat just doesn't fit. It looks like it fits, but it's too small. These things are supposed to loosen up a little with wear, so I've let Vena wear it for a few months now to try to stretch it out, but it still leaves divots in my forehead whenever I try to wear it. I should probably just find some little girl who likes purple and pink and give her the hat.

But anyway, on to my brother. I've made many hats for him, and I'd like to share them now. In case you're interested, the patterns for all the hats that follow came from the excellent Stitch and Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker.

This is the first hat I ever made for my brother. He picked the pattern and the yarn.


He liked the earflaps. That was one of the main reasons he picked that pattern. He wanted something unusual.

He told me he really liked the hat.



Since I made him the hat my brother has become a trucker. He's away from home for long periods of time. Often he has to sleep in very cold places and it's not like you can just leave the truck heater on all night. It gets very cold in there sometimes. He tells me there are mornings when he wakes up and he can see his breath in the air before he even gets out of bed. Seems like a good place to have a hat, right?


So how come over Christmas while I was poking around in his room I saw the hat sitting there and not with my brother on his trip in his cold truck?! Huh?! (The hat was in plain site-- I'm not so nosy I was digging around or anything)

He says it's because the hat is too big and it falls off his head. Huh. I can see that when I put it on Vena, but Brother never mentioned that until it was obvious he wasn't wearing it. Before that he told me he wore it all the time. He never told me it was too big. Hmph.

Anyway, I guess that the last two hats are in the bad hat category, but so you don't think I'm completely incompetent, I have managed to make good hats.

Despite his total dissage of the earflap hat, Brother did ask for more knitted caps (knitted? Hmph!!) for Christmas. I decided to give it another shot. Since he was going to be out of town on Christmas day, I had a little extra time to finish the hats before I needed to fork them over. Here we go:


I made it big and bulky on purpose. The idea is warmth. It's not too big, though. I tried it on myself before I gave it to him and it stays on fine. It comes down over the ears, which is nice.


I think I was in some kind of 70's mood when I bought all the yarn for these creations, by the way. You may notice a sort of 70's color theme. This hat, for example, matches my couch. The big hat came out in some kind of cool camo-ish stripy patterns, which was entirely unintentional. Just like the stripes on the next hat.


A more traditional basic beanie hat.


I really like how the colors look here. I think they go well together.

Though, as I said, the stripes were completely unintentional. They just came out that way. You can tell when you look at the top of the hat. It's all smooged and random up there, and that was how I'd hoped the rest of the hat would come out. I'm not opposed to the stripes, though.

Speaking of stripes...


This hat was intentionally striped. I used one of those self-striping yarns. Red Heart Strata.


I really like how this hat came out. It's one of my favorites of the bunch, and a hat I'd make for myself. The next hat is my other favorite.



Finally! A yarn that didn't insist on striping itself against my will!


After my other yarns striped, I was glad when this one chose to come out in a nicely randomized pattern. This is another hat I'd actually wear myself. I am, of course, speaking as somebody who is not really a hat person.

Here comes the last hat:


This one was finished well after I gave the other hats to my brother. In fact, I only finished it this weekend and haven't had a chance to give it to him yet. As you can see, it's another bulky hat.


I think the single color works well with this hat. It's nice and plain and understated.

Brother claims to like the other hats I've given him. He darn well better. I worked hard on these! He tells me that on especially cold nights he'll layer all the hats at once, with the big bulky one on top. He's going to stretch them all out if he keeps that up, and then he'd better not complain to me that they're too big! Then again, it's possible he's not wearing them after all, and is just saying he likes them to make me feel better. Who knows? I like them, though. And now you can judge for yourself.

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Bad Hats

Ok! As promised, a crochet post!

As the title would suggest, this post is mostly going to be about hats. And not very good ones. I confess, I haven't mastered the whole hat thing yet. But I'm working on it! And today you're going to see some of my early attempts.


But first, a scarf:


Not a hat, I know, but it does match a hat that will be featured today. This scarf was my first attempt at color changes. I had varying levels of success.


If you look closely at the above picture you can see what I mean. When I first started out I had no idea how to change colors so that your final stitch of Color A wouldn't carry up into your first stitch of Color B. I did work it out by the time I finished, fortunately. Then I promptly forgot what it is I did so that I had to relearn it next time I did a project featuring color changes. (You'll see that one in a later post.)

I'll deliver on the promised hats in a moment, but first I'd like to introduce you to my model, Vena:


I bought her today. She makes a very good hat model, especially since I'm too shy to model the hats myself. As you can see, I forgot to remove her price tag.

She was four dollars! Cheap!

If it seems silly that I bought this dummy head just for the blog, remember that should this blog thing not pan out I can always duct tape a brick to Vena and throw her through wurwolf's window. Vena has many powerful uses.

Don't look at Felix, my cat, who is lurking around in the background where he doesn't belong. I like him and I know from experience that bad things happen to pets featured on this blog.

On to an actual hat:


This is the very first hat I've ever made, and ties with one other hat in this post as the worst hat I've ever made. It doesn't look so bad on the floor, I know, but wait until you see it on:



Poor Vena. She has been blinded. This hat is supposed to be a beanie. I suppose it would be perfect for Charlie Brown or maybe a basketball, but it does not work for real people! Or even fake people with semi-realistic head proportions!



One fun thing about wearing this hat is that if you turn your head quickly the hat does not turn with you. It matches the scarf nicely though, at least.

I did learn one big and very important lesson from my experience with this hat:

Gauge is important.

I did not really get this before, but I do now. So while this hat gets an award for suckulence, it's worth it because now I pay attention when a pattern tells me to use a certain weight yarn and a particular size hook. Rookie mistake, I know, but I was a rookie at the time.

Fortunately, there is one way to almost redeem this hat, and that is by pushing it far back on your head, like so:



Do this and it almost looks like I meant to do that. Of course, the hat will drop off your head at the slightest movement, but that's no big loss. It's not a very good hat anyway.

The next hat was another learning experience. It was my first time using mohair.



Some people recommend beginners use mohair because it's so fluffy you can't see the mistakes you make. Mohair is also bad for beginners for the same reason, I find. Not to mention that it's more difficult to handle than a smoother yarn; the hook likes to catch on mohair.

The finished hat doesn't look so bad, but there are some issues, which I'll get to.

The hat is almost too big, but it works out. It looks looser on Vena because she doesn't have any hair. On me it's comfortably loose, but not so loose that it is in danger of falling off.

I had the most problems with the seam, as you might expect with a beginner. The usual difficulties that come with learning to crochet in the round were compounded by using a yarn where I couldn't see my stitches. You can definitely tell where I had to move from one round to the next. It kind of comes to a point in the back-- most likely because I didn't know where the join was supposed to go and there are too many stitches back there. Of course, I couldn't tell you for certain because I can't see the stitches.

Stupid mohair.

But the hat isn't so bad.

Now for an actually good hat:

The pattern for this hat was the very first real pattern I ever had (though not the first pattern I've ever used). It took a while before I was confident enough in my pattern-following skills to give it a shot. I used two colors of fine yarn (black and blue, obviously) and twisted them together, which was fun until the yarn balls wanted to get all twisted up wrong and I had to unwind them.

But anyway.


This hat is almost too small, but it's supposed to loosen up with wear. If I ever wore hats, that might happen.

It's true. I make all kinds of hats, but I never wear hats. I'm told I have a good head for hats. I keep thinking if I keep making hats I'll want to start wearing them, but it has yet to happen. Oh well.

After finishing that hat I had some yarn left, so I decided to make a second hat with it. Then something went wrong:


Hat number 2 is considerably smaller than hat number 1. I don't know why.

It doesn't look so bad there, but look at it on:


Poor Vena. She didn't expect to make her debut like this.

I still don't know why this hat came out so small. It literally fits neatly inside the other hat. No squishage necessary. I used the same pattern. Same hook. Same yarn. I don't know what went wrong here.

Look at that travesty! She looks like she would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Yes, I know. As soon as I saw that something was going wrong I should have frogged the whole thing and started over. By the time I noticed, though, it was pretty clear that I was running out of yarn. I wouldn't have had enough yarn to finish the hat correctly anyway, and since I'd bought the yarn while out of town I couldn't just run out and get more.

So we're left with the munchkin hat, which is the hat that is tying with the big hat for worst hat I ever made. It may even be worse because 1, there's no way to make that thing attractive and 2, I learned NOTHING.


So those are my first attempts at hats. My next post, when I get around to writing it, will feature a project that I was a little more successful at. I can't dwell on my blunders all the time!

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