Ric-Rac Panthers Fan Messy-Bun Earflap Beanie

The football team at our hometown high school, the Perry Panthers, has school colors of maroon and gold. They also have white away-game jerseys, and also alternate uniforms that are primarily black. I'm trying to utilize all of those colors in this hat.

Previous times when I've made this Messy-Bun Earflap Beanie (or the regular hat style), it has been using a combination of three colors. This time I'm attempting to make it using four colors. I sketched out several different stripe arrangements before settling on this configuration. I think it works pretty well at incorporating all four colors while still keeping the maroon and gold as the dominant colors.

Let's go, Panthers!!! 2023 GHSA 4A Football champions!

 

Ric-Rac UGA Fan Messy Bun Beanie

Ever since I made one of these beanies for my grandniece Jill almost four years ago, I've been wanting to make one for myself in a messy-bun style (open top). So when Jill's mom, my niece Renee, announced that she would be hosting a party to celebrate the kickoff of Georgia's new football season, I knew that now was the time to grab my yarn and get hooking on this essential accessory. GOOOOOO Dawgs! Sic 'em! Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof! 🏈

I used scraps of yarn I had in my stash to make this, so, naturally, I ran out of the main red color when I was stitching the brim. I switched to another scrap of red that was a fairly close match to the first red, but there is a tiny bit of difference in the colors. But since this hat is for me, I'm OK with that. 😊

The hat works up quickly, and the cluster V-stitch is super easy while giving the stripes their distinct "ric-rac" look. I use this tutorial on YouTube by Hooked by Robin whenever I need a refresher on how to work the cluster V-stitch. The design is great for showing off the colors of any fandom, and the slouchy, stretchy nature of the beanie is amazingly comfortable for all-game-day wear. The 5/6 ribbed brim in alternating FPDC/BPDC stitches also provides complete, cozy coverage of your ears, which is wonderful on windy autumn/winter game days.

As you can tell by my latest posts, I'm on a beanie-making kick lately, thanks to the approach of fall, my favoritest season in the whole, wide world!! Plus, most crochet hats work up super fast, so it doesn't take long to have your latest favorite hat ready to wear. 

And because crochet hats work up quickly, it also means that I can usually finish one before the arthritis in my hands forces me to take a break from stitching. 👍

 

 

Halloween Snow Heart Beanie

Oooh, it's almost my favorite time of the year again!

Designer Leesa Nixon recently shared a photo on her socials of the Beetlejuice/Halloween colors version of her Snow Heart Beanie (paid pattern), and I just knew that I needed to make one for myself in a messy-bun/ponytail style, because Halloween is probably my favorite holiday, too!!

These Sour Apple poms by Dannisdesignscrafts on Etsy add the perfect finishing touch! This is a really fun and quick pattern to crochet, and it doesn't require very much of each color of yarn. Love it!

Taylor's Beanie

When Taylor Swift wore that crocheted beanie to watch her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, play football with the Kansas City Chiefs, all of the online yarnie groups went BA-NA-NAS with people wanting to know how to make the same hat. It's the Taylor Effect, y'all.

Anyway, if you love a Swiftie, like I do, then you simply MUST make them one of these beanies. It works up quickly with simple stitches, so it's an easy project that will bring a huge thrill to your Swiftie's heart, because in no time at all they will be able to rock this hat just like Taylor did.

To replicate Taylor's look, it's important to use a bright white yarn for the main color and a rich, vibrant red with blue undertones for the stripe.

You will notice that I have the jersey number "wrong" on the beanie I made. That's because my Swiftie also loves a football player, and he happens to wear jersey number 84 (whereas Travis Kelce wears number 87). 

For the fur pom, I found an affordable pack of faux-fur poms on Amazon.

Photo showing Taylor's faux fur pompom

I am working on writing this pattern, which will be available as a free download on Ravelry. I will link to the pattern page here once it's available. Ravelry pattern link: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/taylors-beanie-3

 

Raffie Sun Hat free pattern

This sun hat pattern by Kinga Erdem is drop-dead gorgeous, so I just had to make one. The Raffie Sun Hat pattern is available for free on Kinga's blog, My Hobby Is Crochet.

But I did have to adjust the pattern somewhat to make it in a messy-bun style to accommodate my everyday hairstyle. I used the Peekaboo Sun Hat design by Susanna Biyae as my guide for that. The Peekaboo Sun Hat pattern is available for free on Susanna's blog, Fosbas Designs.

I think I used a thinner raffia than Kinga used for hers, so it wasn't possible for me to meet gauge using the suggested hook size. I went up two hook sizes and also worked the top of the hat to 75 stitches to get to the size I need. My polyester raffia yarn came from Amazon. 

The cluster-stitch pattern for the sides of the hat crown needs a stitch count in a multiple of 3, so changing the stitch count is fairly easy. Kinga works hers in the round (so the right side of the work is always facing you), but for mine I was doing mine in rows (to make the back of the hat open). Fortunately for me, it was possible to work the cluster-stitch pattern she uses simply by reversing the order of the cluster stitches on the wrong-side rows (to keep the clusters "leaning" the same direction). Easy peasy. Working the rows this way probably changes the look of the cluster-stitch pattern somewhat, but I think it turned out great.

The wire rope I used to reinforce the brim came from Home Depot. This product was recommended by Jess Coppom in her free Fedora Crochet Sun Hat pattern, which is available on her blog, Make And Do Crew.

The last thing to figure out is the hat band. I used a 4mm hook and chained 150, which was long enough to wrap around the crown of the hat with ends long enough to tie in a loose square knot. I don't know if I'll leave it like that or if I'll maybe try adding some beads to dress it up a bit without being too busy.

My husband and I have a lovely vacation coming up, and I'm super excited to get to take this gorgeous sun hat along to wear during our adventures.

Peekaboo Sun Hat free pattern

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.

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.

Iced Gingerbread Russian brioche messy bun hat

I have made this hat pattern a couple times before (here and here) and really enjoy it. It isn't exactly standard brioche; the technique is easier than brioche but still results in a beautiful, squishy, reversible, two-color project, so I love it.

The color scheme I've chosen here reminds me of iced gingerbread, so that's what I'm calling this hat. 😊

The biggest difference this time is that I stopped decreasing after the 48-stitch section to leave the top of the crown open as a messy bun/ponytail style hat. I used a 5mm crochet hook to cast off the knitted stitches into a round of 48 SC, and then worked one more round of SC with a few decreases to get the final stitch count down to 40 stitches.

The language of the video is Russian, but it's easy to follow along with the designer, Katerina Mushyn, as she knits in the video, so even if you don't speak Russian, don't be afraid to try this pattern. She also provides written instructions in both Russian and English in the video and on her website.

Video tutorial: https://youtu.be/iPabTSvzu04
Written pattern: http://prjaga.com/vyazanie-dlya-zhenshchin/shapka-beret/komplekt-bordo-shapka-i-snud-spicami

It's also helpful to use a row counter that has main/subcounter functionality with this project. I used this free browser-based Row Counter App.

 

Butter Mellow pocket scarf

Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow,  
Turn this stupid, fat rat yellow.

That silly "spell" didn't work for Ron Weasley in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" as he tried to turn his rat familiar, Scabbers, yellow, but this butter-yellow yarn from my stash knitted up beautifully to make a cozy pocket scarf for Mika and Emmy. 

The sport-weight fiber worked to a gauge of about 4-5 rows per inch. And since I wanted a scarf 80 inches long (to turn up 10 inches at each end for deep pockets, leaving an overall length of about 60 inches), I made the scarf 400 rows long. (Which actually turned out to be a bit too long, but that was OK; I just made the pockets deeper to compensate.) The yarn is an interesting blend of 55% acrylic, 35% rayon, 5% wool, and 5% vinyon (whatever that is!), but the fiber is safe to machine wash and dry, so it's easy to care for.

Cast on with at least 6 rows of waste yarn in a contrasting color to your project yarn, then add your project yarn and crank until you have the desired number of rows. Cast off with another 6 or more rows of waste yarn, then remove project from the machine. Using a 5mm crochet hook, close each end of the tube as shown in this video by Jojo Juju. Fold each end of the scarf until the pockets are as deep as you want and pin them in place with locking stitch markers. Mattress stitch both sides of each pocket and knot securely. Hide all tails inside the tube, and enjoy your new pocket scarf! 

Jojo also has a full video tutorial for how to machine-knit a pocket scarf, which you can view at this link.

The sport-weight yarn is rated a 2, when usually size 4 yarn is used in the circular knitting machines. For me the trick to getting lightweight yarns like that to work in the machine is to maintain a firm tension.

I had just enough yarn left after knitting the scarf to make a matching beanie of 113 rows.

 

Crochet candy corn owl beanie free pattern

Just in time for looking cute on crisp autumn days, this is a messy-bun version of Sarah Zimmerman's Candy Corn Hat, free pattern on Sarah's blog Repeat Crafter Me at this link. 

I didn't have any yellow worsted or aran weight yarn in my stash, so I used some yellow Fixler Brothers Quick Knit sport weight held double, and it turned out just fine. You can read the details about the other yarns I used at my Ravelry project page.

The pattern didn't say what size of safety eyes to use for the owl's pupils, so I used 25mm (1 inch) black buttons instead, from a set I found on Amazon at this link.

My favorite resource for buying safety eyes is 6060 on Etsy, but in the case of this hat project, it was easier for me to use buttons.

Ric-rac UGA fan slouchy hat

Made this for our Georgia Bulldog, Jill. I recently saw some designs (such as the ZiggyZag Vixen Slouchy Hat by Faith Holbrook) made with the ric-rac stitch (or cluster V-stitch) and really liked the look (it also looks great worked flat as a blanket, etc.), so I just had to try it. 

This slouchy hat design lends itself nicely to working with team or school colors. Very quick and easy to make.

I made the pompom removable, so the hat can be safely washed without it.

I also made this quick little coffee cozy for Jill, since she loooves coffee. 

I made this in YOslst, also called HDC slip stitch. 16 stitches tall. 

Apropos feltie came from TheWiredPlanner on Etsy.

Alpine stitch balaclava

At least five years ago, my daughter LadyU asked me to make her a balaclava she could wear while walking the dogs during winter. It took me a long while to finally get around to making it for her, but hopefully she will like it! (There has been a bit of a long saga predating today's project.)

Inspired by the Alpine Ninja balaclava, I used the Crochet with GG video tutorial at this link to learn how to make the alpine stitch in the round (top down), but I worked the top of this hat differently than was shown in the video.

Top part of hat (above the opening for the wearer's face) is worked with a J/6mm hook; bottom part of hat (cowl) is worked with a K/6.5mm hook.

I prefer to work hats top-down, but I don't like patterns where the top stitch count increases so rapidly that the top of the hat curls ferociously until you work far enough down the sides that it helps to tame the curling a bit. That was what was happening on this one when I tried to follow the stitch counts in the video tutorial. So instead I started with 10 sts and made standard increases on that count (next row 20, next row 30, etc.).

My goal was to end up with a total of 72 sts after all the increases, but somehow I ended up with 76 sts on the last increase row; I figured that was close enough (the most important thing was to end up with an even number of sts for the alpine stitch to work). The crown is worked with alternating FPDC and BPDC sts because it's easier to do increases with that combo of sts than it is to try to do increases in the alpine stitch, and I like how the alternating FPDC/BPDC more closely resembles the texture of the alpine stitch at the crown (it looks better than making the crown with all plain DC).

I didn't actually keep count while working the crown, but I think the crown here is 22 rows in purple (the first 6 or 7 rows are alternating FPDC/BPDC increases, then I switched to alpine stitch). If you want to change colors where the balaclava splits to make the face opening, it's important to end the first color on an alpine stitch row where you're working the FPDC/DC sts. The next row is a SC row. I was beginning/ending rounds at the center back. Place stitch markers at each side of the face opening. Then on the SC row,  join your new color and SC to first marker; FSC for however many sts you need to skip to reach the next marker; at the next marker, SC normally to the end of the round. This way when you continue the following row in alpine stitch (FPDC/DC), the color change will look better because the post stitches are reaching across an SC row of the same color (rather than an SC row of a different color).

That's just the way I wanted the color change on this hat to look. It probably could look cool to do the color change over a contrasting SC row as well (so if that's the way you want to do it on your project, go for it!). I also increased the stitch count for the cowl portion to 78 for a bit more ease around the wearer's face.

It only took a few days to complete the crocheted portion of this project. The part that subsequently took months to do was searching for an acceptable pair of buttons to sew onto the folded tab as the last finishing touch. Originally I wanted to use a pair of Pokemon character buttons, but I wasn't able to find any I liked or that would be suitable here. So finally I settled on these washable coconut wood buttons, which I think look nice with the project.

Updated to add a removable 3.5-inch pom:

Cookie Monster costume hat

Cookie Monster is my all-time favorite Muppet, so I wanted to make a messy-bun-style hat of this character. I started mine too late to wear it for Halloween this year, but I'll totally be ready next year!

I used a variation of the Loopy Chemo Cap pattern from my free Chemo Cap Bundle. Instead of starting at the very top of the hat, I started with 40 foundation HDCs (the equivalent of round 4) and then continued to work the pattern as written from there.

I used the Addi Pro 22-needle knitting machine to make the white part of Cookie Monster's eyeballs. My first attempt turned out looking super lumpy and squished, which led me to conclude that the eyes needed a bit of polyfil stuffing to help them hold their round shape.

To make the eyeballs: Cast on with white yarn and knit for 19 rows. Cut a long tail and use a bent-tip needle to cast the stitches off the machine. Gently stretch the knitted piece, and then gently cinch the ends. Fold one end inside the other (same as when you're making a beanie). Pull the yarn tails through the "top" of the cinched ends and knot securely. (This cinched end will be the front of the eyeball; you will later cover this cinched end with a crocheted black pupil.) Thread one tail onto a yarn needle. Grab one handful of polyfil and poke the needle through the center of the polyfil, then slide the polyfil down the yarn tail until it's sitting inside the "cup" of the eyeball. Using the tail on the yarn needle, pick up the bar in the middle of every third stitch along the top of the folded edge (these stitches will be used to cinch closed what is currently the folded end of the eyeball). Gently pull on the yarn tail to cinch the folded end closed, then stitch across the cinched opening to secure. Thread the other yarn tail onto the needle and poke it through the center of the eyeball and out the other side that you just cinched closed. Being careful not to pull too hard and squish/flatten the eyeball, knot the yarn tails together again several times to secure. Leave the long white tails for now so you can use them later to sew the eyeball onto the hat.

Using black yarn, crochet a small "pupil" for each eyeball by working 6 SC into a magic circle. Use the invisible joining technique to finish the outer edge. Tightly cinch the center of each pupil and knot to secure. Leave a long tail to sew each pupil onto the front of each eyeball, centered over the front cinched end. Knot to secure and hide black yarn tails inside the center of the eyeball.

Using the long white yarn tails, attach the eyeballs to the hat and knot several times to secure. Weave in ends and wear your Cookie Monster hat with pride!