Tangled up...

Over the weekend, I decided to start working on a Santa hat for my son. I was tangled up in all those pieces of yarn from the stocking I had started, and I had to get rid of them. I had no luck finding a pattern for a child's size Santa hat... I ended up finding a generic "how to" for a Santa hat on ehow.com (Who knew they had crochet patterns??), so I tried that. I got really frustrated making it... I can't stand single crochets throughout a whole project. I worked on it forever and felt like I wasn't getting anywhere so I starting making the increases sooner than I was supposed to and switched to a larger hook. What turned out wasn't pretty and it was too big, LOL. That's okay, it will be my boy's play hat!

The white part was supposed to be folded up, but because I had switched hooks, it was too big to fold up and it wasn't snug with the hat. Also, I used Lion Brand Homespun for it and the stitches just weren't tight enough. Homespun created another problem for me. I noticed that the end I started with was very frayed... Well, the ball on top was supposed to be a pom pom. I figured if I made a pom pom it would end up looking horrible, because all of those little ends would fray.

So, I decided to try to roll some yarn into a ball. It worked! I was able to secure the loose end with a needle and then secure it to the hat by running the white yarn through the top of the hat (from the inside), running it through the ball, and then back into the hat.I can't believe it worked!

Other than the Santa hat, over the weekend I:

made a 7 x 9 piece for Warm Up America,

made a Christmas tree [Pattern],

and a hat. [Pattern] This is the same as the white hat, but I used pink and will not be putting a flower on it. The pattern starts out with chain 60. To make it larger, you have to add on in incriments of 6.I chained 72. (The larger white one I made, I chained 78 for, and didn't make revisions at the end so the top turned out a little different). At the end of the pattern, I repeated the last *ch 2, sc in sc, ch 2, 3 dc in sc* one extra time. That helped with the top a lot, I just had to make a minor change to the next step. This hat is a Christmas present for my BFF at home's two year old, and I'm going to make a larger one for her five year old. Then, I'm making lots more little Christmas trees, and I'm going to attempt stars and snowflakes to attach to Christmas presents!! I love Christmas!