Two hats

[magid]

I had more black cotton yarn left after making the film hat I posted last month, and decided to use that with a two-toned blue yarn of the same material for a small hat. I had wanted to have more of a brim, but ran out of black yarn (managing to get two hats, albeit smallish, from two skeins of yarn felt like I was getting away with something). The triple crochets around the side were for venting, since I had been thinking of this as a summery hat, though perhaps it would be better with a ribbon woven in instead.




And I finally made the sun hat I've been thinking of for months. Instead of regular yarn, I cut up dead T-shirts, spiraling up the trunk to the sleeves for one length, and up each sleeve for two more, all half an inch to an inch wide. This generated large amounts of cotton bits that look remarkably like really bad dandruff. Once I'd cut some shirts up, I started crocheting them, using my largest hook (15.75 mm), which took some getting used to. Again, this generated more cotton dandruff (which is why I needed to run the hat through a laundry cycle when it was done). I wasn't sure how much I'd need, so I crocheted what I had, then cut up another T-shirt. I ended up using most of four white shirts and one blue shirt, which felt really useful, turning clothing that had become not useful into something new and exciting.

The only part I wish had come out a bit differently is that the patterns on the original tees tend to be curled into the inside of the 'yarn' rather than the outside, so they rarely show. The last white tee I used turned out to be thinner than some of the others, which ended up being useful to helping the brim turn up, as I decreased stitches. And if it's really sunny, I can turn the brim down, as in the last photo.

Comments

Love the hats!

[(Anonymous)]

Those are great. I love the idea of old t-shirts, I have some in cool colors. Any interest in posting a pattern? N from PDX

Re: Love the hats!

[magid.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I don't really have a pattern, just followed what I'd been doing for the other hats: crochet a flat base (well, top), out wider than my head. Decrease some to turn to the sides and pull in, until I got to a comfortable circumference, when I started working in the blue intermittently, until it was all blue. I decreased a bit by the edge so it would curl up and have more structure. The whole thing is in single crochet.

Re: Love the hats!

[(Anonymous)]

When you crochet such a base, how do you increase consistently yet avoid getting polygons?

Re: Love the hats!

[magid.livejournal.com]

I increase at random, enough to keep the circle flat without curving into a sphere or wiggling into a hyperbolic surface. It's more by feel than by a number of increases in a given pattern.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Wonder how knitting with torn up tee shirts would work? And what would I make. Perhaps a boxy little jacket?

Thanks for the inspiration.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I saw more information about knitting with T-shirt "yarn" than crocheting, so I bet it would work fine. My issue is that I mostly have white(ish) tees, and I don't wear a lot of white clothes otherwise.

[(Anonymous)]

The first hat is so elegant! Could you have done the top all black?

Perhaps you might've gotten less T-shirt dust had your cuts been vertical.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I could have done the top all black, except that I knew I didn't have much left of the black, and wanted to make it go farther.

And vertical cuts wouldn't have worked well at all for the T-shirts, since cutting horizontally in a spiral gave me one piece from the trunk of the shirt, long enough to crochet for a while without having to switch to a new piece. Cutting vertically would have meant a new piece of 'yarn' every x stitches, where x would certainly have been less than 10.