Hats and More Hats

For your viewing pleasure, we present tonight:

The Many Hats of El Burrito

Hat Number 1: The Awesome Hospital Hat. A nice blue/green/yellow variegated hat, done in either single or half-double crochet. He probably got this one because it was the only one big enough for his large head. I'm not kidding here; he's consistently in the 95+ percentile for head circumference at his pediatrician visits. It's a family thing, not a medical problem. His father's family just has large noggins. It's probably part of the reason he was a C-section.

He got a second hat at the hospital, a blue knitted one, but it was too small from the beginning. It kept squirting up off his head.


Hat Number 2: The blue variegated hat I did when he started to outgrow the Hospital Hat. Done in Red Heart Super Saver's Aqua color, I think. There was test hat before this one, done with random increases and guesswork, because I could not find a pattern for a plain crochet hat anywhere, just hats with bobbles, ear flaps, poofy bits, and other frills. I thought it would be better to start with something simple. I finally got smart and counted the stitches on the Hospital Hat. I wish I'd thought of that bright idea sooner. That guesswork hat is pretty ratty looking, but it served its purpose. I also used it to practice puff stitches for the Acorn hat later on.

The Aqua is not as soft as the yarn in the Hospital Hat, but I couldn't find anything close to that color mix. I looked at the soft baby yarns, but there wasn't a lot of selection. Yellows and pinks seem to be common, at least around here, and I was wanting something with blues and purples. Apparently purple and green are now "girl" colors, and I didn't get that memo. Almost all of the cute purple baby clothes are for girls, and they put in enough ruffles and bows that I couldn't get away with letting El Burrito wear most of them. :-(

Hat Number 3: The candy corn hat. I found the pattern online somewhere and thought it would be good practice. You can't see too well in this picture, but it's striped like a piece of candy corn, and his sleeper also has candy corn print. Also done in acrylic, some Caron and some Red Heart, I think. Caron's yarn seems to be softer, at least in the colors I used for this hat.

Finding the right shade of orange was surprisingly hard, since it was October at the time. I also ended up with a big skein of florescent hunter orange, so maybe my brother and dad will get bright orange hats one of these days.


Hat Number 4: The Acorn hat, from a book called Too Cute Crochet for Babies & Toddlers. There are a lot of cute hats in the book, including a couple that I plan to make in the future (a white sailor hat, yellow fisherman's rain hat, and possibly a red cowboy hat). I used Lily Sugar & Cream cotton yarn, in Jute and Warm Brown, which is what most of the examples in the book were done with. It's supposed to have two crocheted leaves on the top, but I didn't get the yarn for that, and I don't fully trust the book's pattern to be easy to follow, or correct, for that matter. They had a big error in the pattern for this one, the hat was two inches larger than it should have been and there was a lovely night spent trying to figure out why.

This one came out pretty well. I did have to adjust to the cotton yarn instead of acrylic. The cotton seems to grab the hook more, even though I use metal hooks. It took a while to get used to that and the way it changed the tension and gauge.