I have been admiring the crocodile stitch hats and gloves Samantha at Skye Cottage Crochet makes with this yarn for a couple of months now and decided to dive in and have a try for myself! It is no secret that I am a huge fan of rainbows and so I chose this shade, called Fab, with its lovely dark and muted rainbow tones.
I started with a direct copy of the work I had so admired from Skye Cottage and the Crocodile Stitch Pixie Hat by Thread Softly. This was my first venture into Crocodile Stitch but with a little help from this tutorial video from Bella Coco I found it pretty straightforward.
I made the baby sized hat, there is never a shortage of babies to gift hats too, and am really pleased with the way it turned out… except there isn’t the full rainbow in this hat.
So I made another one.
I find the arrangement of colours to be very pleasing in this hat, this is what I was hoping for. But I noticed something very interesting about the sizing. You can see it with these two photos but it is clearer still in this one.
The first hat, my first foray into crocodile stitch and first attempt at this pattern is noticeably smaller than the second one which I made while feeling much more relaxed about working a familiar pattern.
The pattern gives no notes about gauge, tension or finished sizes and so it is hard to make a judgement about changing hook size when I inevitably make it again. I have compared the size of the hats to other baby hats I have around and both are around the same size so I think we are in the right ballpark, I guess I’ll have to find a baby to try them out!
Two baby hats used 60g of my 100g ball so what to do with the remainder?
Wrist warmers! I used this pattern for Winter Fanfare Wrist Warmers by Drops Design. I found the written pattern to be clear as mud but they do also offer a video in support of this free pattern which fully explained the bits I was struggling with. I’m really pleased with the look of these but the design lacks stretch making them quite constrictive and not as comfy as they could be. I am going to go ahead and gift them to my intended recipient who I think will like them but I don’t think I will revisit this pattern.
The initial problems I had with the wrist warmer pattern also served to highlight my big issue with the yarn. The colours are beautiful. Absolutely stunning and what caused this yarn to land in my shopping basket. It is a blend of 30% wool and 70% acrylic and is quite thin for a DK. It is really quite fluffy which isn’t a problem when things are going well, I like the halo of fuzz around it, but when things go wrong it does not behave well at all. This yarn does not like to be undone from stitches. It clings to itself and sticks making it a nightmare to frog or even to tink (or whatever the crochet equivalent is tehcorc doesn’t roll off the tongue in the same way as knit backwards does!)
Back to my one ball, 100g, 296m of yarn. A teeny tiny portion ended up in the bin after my second wrist warmer ended up joined in a mobius strip rather than a circle in an incident involving me trying to watch telly and crochet and the rest of it is shown here.
2 baby hats, 2 wrist warmers and a weeny ball of leftovers. I’m happy with that.
I Am Branching Out 