I first attempted this pattern in 2020, right before my family decided to move cross-country, so this project got put away for a few years until things started to settle down again. But I never forgot about it because I think it's a great pattern. I wear my hair in a messy bun during the day at least 99% of the time, so I love hat patterns that are designed to accommodate my preferred hairstyle.
Messy bun hats for winter became all the rage a while back (which was great for me), and we saw many variations of beanie patterns designed that way, but there still aren't many summer/sun hats around that are made to work for long-haired people who want to both wear their hair up and also wear a hat for sun protection in summer.
This Peekaboo Sun Hat designed by Susanna Biaye is a very well designed, great solution to that dilemma. I love it.
In 2020, I initially started working the pattern using some leftover Red Heart yarn in my stash, but it didn't take long for me to realize that this heavy worsted acrylic fiber was not going to make a hat that would feel comfortable to wear in the summer heat. Then, as I said before, life got in the way, and this project got shelved.
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| First try in Red Heart acrylic |
When I finally had time to think about trying this pattern again in April 2023, I had decided I wanted to make it using either some thin jute cord or else maybe a raffia paper ribbon.
I had most of a spool of this 2mm jute cord in my crafting stash (leftover from making tags for Christmas ornaments, etc.) and decided to see if I could use it to make the Peekaboo Sun Hat. (One 1,100-foot spool of the jute cord is amply more than enough to make one of these hats.)
The jute is very coarse, but it was surprisingly easy to crochet with using a 5.5mm hook. However, to make the hat more comfortable to wear, I plan to add an interior band (like a sweatband) cut from one of my husband's old T-shirts. I will also tack on a black grosgrain ribbon as a hatband on the exterior. It took me a few weeks after completing the crochet part of this project to finish sewing on the black band by hand.
Because I was working at a different gauge, I had to modify some of the stitch/row counts from the original pattern, but that wasn't too difficult.
The roughness of the jute fiber gives the hat a bit of a broken-in look like you'd see on a gently-worn old straw hat. I think this will be a great hat to wear while working in the garden or even while out hiking.
This is the first time I've ever added a wire to a hat brim for shaping. From the little I've read about the process, it seems that using a thin twisted cable type of galvanized flexible wire is better for hats than a single-ply wire. The thin wire cable is marketed under many descriptive key words; I found what appears to be a suitable product by searching for "picture hanging wire." Each hat brim needs about 50 inches of the wire (or about 1.4 yards), so you obviously don't need to buy a 100-foot roll of the stuff unless you're planning to mass-produce a lot of crocheted sun hats.
The trickiest part for me, since I'm new to adding wire to hats, was figuring out which gauge of wire would be heavy/strong enough to hold the brim in shape without being too heavy or too thin. Again, from the bit of reading I've done of what other yarncrafters have written about adding wire to hat brims, is that a wire gauge of somewhere between 16 gauge (about 1.6mm or 1/8th-inch thick) to 20 gauge (about 0.9mm or 1/16th-inch thick) is the ideal.
After a lot of clicking around, I found this blog post and pattern for the free Fedora Crochet Sun Hat by Jess Coppom of Make and Do Crew; she suggested this 1/16 in. x 50 ft. Galvanized Steel Uncoated Wire Rope from Home Depot, and I decided to use that wire for my hat brim.
If you look at my photo where I'm in the process of adding the wire to the brim, you'll see how the part of the brim with the wire is lying flat, whereas the part of the brim without the wire is lying crumpled and shapeless. It's fun to see how the simple addition of the wire is a game-changer for shaping the wide brim of the sun hat.
The brim on my hat is about 3.5 inches deep with 144 stitches around. I used a 6.5mm hook for working the last round with the wire added.