Handmade beanies

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything. While I was gone, I’ve travelled back to Singapore for 2 weeks or so, and completed a couple of crochet projects. Some were gifts for friends and family so I didn’t want to reveal anything in advance, but now that they have all been gifted away, I’m really eager to share them with you now. I’ll be revealing them over the coming week so do stay tuned!

First, I thought I’d drop in and talk about the beanies I made for Deon and myself sometime in April. Correction: his was a bit of a failure so it remains a work-in-progress (WIP) until I find the time to redo it.

For him

When I’m doing something new, I also like to try out new crochet patterns at the same time. For his beanie, I followed Rich Textures Crochet’s mountain ridge beanie pattern. The resulting pattern has a really nice texture and thickness, and is visually attractive with almost a diagonal herringbone look.

We wanted to match the colours with his scarf, so I used my grey and red acrylic yarn from Poundland, and So Crafty’s DK acrylic yarn in the shade moonlit ocean.

Unfortunately, after nearly completing the project, we realised that the beanie looked very much like a target 🎯 when worn. Poor planning on my part as I didn’t really go into it with a specific design; I just did colour changes on the fly when I felt I was running out of a certain colour.

I shelved this disaster for another day as I was also rushing a surprise wedding gift for my sister (keep an eye out for that!). Now that I’m back I should unravel it and redo it sometime soon.

For her

The next beanie was a tad more successful, which also doubled up as an attempt to use up the unused acrylic yarn from Poundland that have been slightly ignored ever since I bought the baby chenille yarn from Aldi and 100% cotton DK mini skeins from Ricorumi.

I wanted to try making a slouchy beanie, and decided to go with Sewrella‘s Puff Stitch Slouchy Beanie design. Instead of one main colour, I added a band of off-white to break up the sea of pink. I also added a pink and white pompom using the same yarn (and using up the remaining scraps in the process).

I’d say I got the sizing almost right, but the brim is one to two sizes too large, so it feels rather loose on my head. Still, I managed to get a few wears out of it before summer arrived!

I was kind of rushing both beanies at the time as I wanted Deon and I to be able to wear them before it became too warm (too odd) to be wearing a beanie out and about. But it might have inadvertently created these mistakes. Lesson learnt!