Cluster of baby hats

After just a week of frantic crochet I now have 4 pretty little hats for the Save the Children "Knit one save one" appeal. With a little trial and error I did manage to design my own version of the new born hat pattern that was published in Woman's Weekly. In fact - I had so much fun designing the first hat that I also designed a similar second hat (you can find these patterns in the sidebar on the right).

The two patterns for these hats (shown in the photo as the first 3 hats - blue, lilac & pink) should hopefully be error free and are much, much easier to make up than the pattern that I spent a week struggling with. These little hats are now destined to be sent off to my Mum for packaging up with any hats that she and my sister make up. Hopefully they help warm some little newborn heads soon.

Save the Children hat

My mum sent me a pattern from her copy of Woman's Weekly so I could join in with the latest Save the Children campaign which is trying to get knitters and crocheters all making up hats for newborns.

I've had a number of problems in working up this pattern though - to the point where I almost tore it apart in frustration. The pattern is worked from the bottom up as one flat piece and then joined together at the end. The instructions for this are very confusing and the pattern's main stitch is working crossed dc's which I had not encountered before.

I'm very tempted to have a go at writing a similar pattern that would be quicker to work up and much easier to understand... for starters I would certainly want to be working this in a round with no joining together at the end. I may even publish it on Crochet Me so that anyone else who wants to join in this appeal can have a nice simple pattern to work with.

For a quick laugh I've included a photo of my first attempt making this pattern up - looks pretty bad right?

Jayne Cobb hat

Some of you may already know who Jayne Cobb is - but for those of you who don't he was one of the characters in the fantastic series "Firefly" and during that series he received a hat similar to the one I have just finished making.

Over at the Crochet Me website Kim Werker has put out a call asking all crocheters to have a go at making up one of these hats and posting a photo of themselves in it in the hopes of enticing Joss Wheldon (creator of Firefly, Buffy & Angel) to do an interview with her.

Well my attempt isn't quite right, it has 2 extra colours in it for starters (I didn't have enough of one yellow for the top so to even that out I had to use an extra darker red at the bottom) and instead of using a chunky yarn I ended up with a much finer double knitting yarn... so I had to do my own pattern. I still like this hat though - and hopefully my sister will too as it is one of the first of the Christmas presents I've made... only about 50 more to do *sigh*.