Fiber Monday 14

So, it's 62℉ and windy. We're waiting on the rain for today and tomorrow. I'm wrapped up in my pajama pants, a Tesla sweatshirt, and a fluffy green blanket with a cup of coffee and a skein of yarn.

Life is spectacular.

Summer is not my favorite season (you may have noticed). Spring is super muddy and annoying here. Winter is brutal.

Fall is 12 days away. The local Dunkin Donuts where I go to Eat Like A Man (lol, if you got that reference, you're pretty Elite, if you know what I'm sayin...) has its apple donuts and apple cider.

This is the kind of stuff I live for. I'm a Halloween and fiery maple leaves kind of person. I like to watch our squirrels (one of which I swear has reverse-albinism because it's 100% black and looks amazing) scrambling around and shoveling bird seed into their cute little faces. I like to feel the weather shifting from hot and wet to cooler and drier (though today has a dubious humidity of 60%...).

Also, my mother is feeding our cat spice cake. The cat demands more and more every time she gets some! Unfortunately, she has few teeth (progressive periodontal disease from before we had her), so the cake falls out of her mouth onto my mother's lap.

Since it's getting cooler, I figured we should work on something to keep our heads warm.

That's right, we're trying out a hat!

Specifically this hat.

I have a Ravelry account so I can browse patterns (there's a hammerhead shark that I want to make soon!), and if you're going to do the crochet thing like me, I strongly suggest going and getting one, too!

To start our hat, I'm going to try to teach you how to make a magic circle to start with. The pattern calls for chaining 2 and making all six initial stitches into the first stitch you made. I prefer the look of the magic circle.

Basically, you make a circle with your yarn (not a knot, just a circle), put your hook through, and make a chain onto the circle.

Then, you make your stitches into the circle. Poke through the center, make your stitches. 6 of them.

You may have noticed that the circle is a bit... big. That's fine. If we've done it right, you take the tail and pull. To have this work, you should have made your stitches over the tail as well as the main part of the circle. It's fairly intuitive. You're basically tying the circle into place.

Anyway, when you pull the tail, it will shrink the circle and pull the stitches closer together so they form a disk.

If you look in the absolute center of your disk, you might start snickering. Yes it kind of looks like a butthole. Yes it's funny. If you've quite recovered, we can continue trying to make something to keep our ears warm. 😜

What we do next is to start stitching. It's the second new thing we'll learn for this (the first being the "magic circle"). Now we're going to learn how to increase.

Increasing is very easy. It's usually shown in patterns as 2sc (or 2dc or 2hdc or 2whatever stitch). That's because you're crocheting two stitches into one spot. You start with one stitch, just like we've done in the past. You don't chain to start new rows here, either - it's one continuous spiral.

You put your hook into the next stitch (count back six from where you left off).
Make your stitch.

Put your hook back into the same stitch you were just in.
Make another stitch.

Now you do that in every stitch. I find it easier to just count everything out as I do it. You can always mark the first stitch to keep track of when you're starting a new round. Rows don't really work when you're crocheting in the round, hence new layers being called "rounds".

You should have 12 stitches at the end of the second round. Your third round is a where we start to understand that increasing is always in multiples of whatever the first round was. If you stitch 6, it's multiples of six. Third round means that you're going to have 18 stitches. You get there by doing a single crochet in the first stitch, then 2sc (an increase) in the next. You repeat the 1sc, 2sc pattern all the way around until you have 18 stitches!

Round 4 has 24 stitches (6*4=24)

The last round I did was round 5, which concluded with 30 stitches.

As you can see, the hat grows pretty fast! Tune in weekly for more hat, and we'll be done pretty soon, I think.

I'm sorry if I'm not being very clear. It's hard to take photos and explain how it works while I'm crocheting. I highly recommend watching some YouTube videos to get a better look at what I'm trying to do. (I need to rediscover the one with the cactus in a pot...)

As for the color, yeah, that's a skein of baby-color yarn. I like the colors - there's some green, some blue, some yellow, and just a hint of coral in the white. It looks cool. Hopefully, someone will like it. We shall see :)

That's all for me, today.

Go Enjoy Something!
FC