A final flurry of hat making...

I'm coming to the end of my gift subscription to Inside Crochet. It's been equal to having a gift every month, especially as I choose a quiet spell, make a large mug of tea and indulge in some crochet heaven. I really wanted to make at least one of the projects per issue, even if it was only a small one but somehow life gets in the way. I have made quite a few, and some are bookmarked and 'in the queue' so to speak.

Now that things are mainly all in one place in my new little craft space I can finally get my magazines filed in issue order and begin to enjoy going through these back copies again and work through my 'to make' list. That's my plan for 2016 anyway.

I try to resist buying other magazines, though lately it's been my reading matter of choice when I'm comfortably detained in a warm coffee shop in some strange town, where I've browsed all the charity shops and I'm waiting for M to finish a job. It's hard to resist all those Christmassy covers.

I picked up Mollie Makes last week. It has a simple knitted hat pattern inside and I thought that knitting hats might make a nice change. Funnily enough I didn't have the £18.50 ball of yarn that the pattern calls for in my stash so I thought I'd just make a start using something of a similar weight. Wrong! Turns out that very few yarns have a similar gauge. I managed to get a result by switching from 15mm needles to 12mm and adding six stitches to the cast on and a few extra rows to the body.

When I proudly modelled the inky blue hat (pictured third down) the other day Ella asked, 'how many hats does one house need?' This is teenage code for, 'I hope one of those hats is for me.' (I'm pretty good at deciphering teenage code). So we discussed colours, levels of slouch, to pom or not to pom, and finally I ended up making this VIP red carpet version, complete with extra rows for 'level one' slouch, and a giant pom pom.

My favourite so far though, has to be the two strand navy and grey tweed version. Love those little white flecks from the grey yarn, reminds me of snow! Two strands of chunky on 12mm needles with a few pattern adjustments seems to be a good combination for warmth without too much bulk. Now finally I think I might make myself one, then it's back to good old crochet which doesn't cause any wrist pain no matter how long I crochet for. Thank Crunchie for crochet!