Honeycomb hats...

I might as well be calling these cricket hats. Most of the work was done on arrival at two day long matches recently. One in Stoke on Trent and the other at Cleethorpes, both County under 15s although Jake seems far too tall for this age group now, at 6'3.

Red is a devil of a colour to photograph. It took a bit of shuffling my little table around to get the light right so that it wouldn't merge into one big lump of red with no definition. Limitations of an iPad camera too I guess.

Naturally I started the little red hat half way through the slog of the oatmeal one. I was curious to know how much quicker or less fiddly it would work up in a chunky yarn. The answer is, not much. The secret is too keep the slip stitches nice and loose. So, this is not a fast fabric to work up but well worth it for a hat because it provides a nice amount of stretch for a good moulded fit, not to mention a look that might not be obviously crochet to the untrained eye! In fact the knitted honeycomb stitch looks pretty similar.

I think there may well be more of these in my crocheting future. I'm now curious to play around with stitch counts between changes and some kind of honeycomb yellow yarn is just crying out to be made as a baby or toddler hat with a small crochet bumble bee attached!

My next step is to crochet another adult hat so that I can write down and share the pattern. Coincidentally this kind of stitch was also the pattern for the last Scheepjes CAL square, at least I think it's pretty much the same, I haven't started those yet. It seems I finally succumbed to the boredom of repetition even though each week is entirely different. Psychologically it's just more squares. I really need to work on my concentration span.

I used to wait until we took the caravan away for a long weekend or longer to get projects like that done and dusted. The trick was not having a yarn stash, crochet magazines and the Internet as distractions. Not to mention leisurely summer evenings (are we ever going to have those again?)

We've barely taken the caravan anywhere in the last two years which is something I'm trying to rectify. As the children have lost interest as they've grown up I'm in the process of emptying out all their 'junk'. Things like body boards, buckets and spades, balls of every type, kites, board games, plastic cricket sets, pop up goals, comedy films on DVD, books, boules, scooters, skateboards and probably much more once I get as far as the main under bed storage bunk. It's a wonder we ever had any room for the four of us with all that on board! I'm looking forward to creating a more minimalist interior which I will find a more relaxing 'get away' opportunity.