I, too, have made a hat!

Looking on the feed thingammy  of blogs I follow on Monday, I noticed that Lucy at Attic24 was proudly announcing through her entry's title that she'd made a hat.  I duly read through, admired and decided that this was the type of hat that I, too, was going to make.

Later on that morning, I had to go into Colchester to collect some things I'd ordered from M&S so paid a trip to Franklins, the main yarn shop in the town.  I came out with three balls of King Cole Merino Blend DK.  One in dark red, one in a leafy green and one in dark blue.  I should have bought two balls of the red as crochet eats yarn more quickly than does knitting.  I also bought a ball of Wendy Roam Fusion sock yarn, some short 5mm KnitPro tips and an 80cm KnitPro cable (it's a size I use a lot) but let's forget about those additional things that jumped into my hands, shall we.

I was busy on Monday afternoon, so it was Tuesday morning before I got the chance to introduce hook to yarn, but off I went and by Tuesday evening, I'd finished the main part of the hat.  Because of only having one ball of the main colour yarn, my hat is more stripey than Lucy's and I didn't have enough red  yarn to do a final round of trebles, so did doubles on that row - I don't think it's made much of a difference to the hat at all.

Wednesday I got waylaid by other things until evening, when I used some needlepoint wool to add a row of running stitch through one of the contrast stripes.  This morning, I did two more rows of running stitch using other colours in other stripes and then I made a crocheted flower to go on the side (making it up as I went along), using the colours already in the hat.  I'm rather pleased with the flower.  I didn't want anything too ruffly, but I didn't want something two-dimensional either.

And, here it is, modelled on an upturned pudding basin:

Here's the flower:

And here's a bad photo of me wearing it:

I shall  wear it when I take Jess for a walk this afternoon and when I go and collect DD2 from the station later.  In fact, I shall probably wear it lots of places over the next four or five months :D

Back now to knitting DD1's hoodie (coming along nicely, but a bit slowly) and mother-in-law's Christmas scarf (one false start but I've tweaked the pattern and it's ok now).  I've also got a pair of bright socks on the needles for those times when the pale green and natural shades of the other two items becomes a bit too bland!