… and it’s been a long time in the making too!
I originally bought this raffia in Okadaya in Shinjuku, and subsequently this pattern book in a newsagent in the Kanazawa train station, back in 2019, pictured in this post here, and the anticipated hat been on the to-do list ever since…
I took all the bits and pieces off to the Maldives with me, in full confidence that I would comfortably produce a hat during my long idle hours lounging around by our pool … ha ha ha. Oh, the naivety of the beginner crocheter! I made a pretty good start during our holiday, for sure… several pretty good starts, in fact.
You see, the first few times I started I realised something was going irretrievably wrong and I would unravel the whole thing and start over. It was frustrating, to say the least. I reckon I’ve done enough crocheting for at least four hats, in the making of this one. Finally I came to the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with my Japanese translation, or my tension, as I’d first thought, but that there WAS something wrong with the pattern, sadly. My hat was going to be enormous. Once I realised those things, I decided to ignore the stitch count of the pattern and instead calculated my own based on the hat dimensions helpfully laid out in one of the diagrams. There was less unravelling once I adopted this approach; still a bit of unravelling but I was finally onto a successful formula. Finally, my hat turned out ok, I think.
As I approached the end of the third and last ball, I pre-crocheted the hat band and keepers, and then proceeded to use up every last scrap of the raffia, right up until the very last centimetre. To be honest, I would have actually liked to have a fourth ball so as to get a much wider brim, but well… it can’t be helped. This was impossible to predict at the time of purchase.
When I was taking these pictures, in our own back yard instead of the much hoped for Maldives photo-op; it was quite windy so I added a length of shirring elastic, to go under my hair and help keep the hat on during walks on our very windy beach. After the hours and unnecessary hours that went into making it four times over, I wouldn’t want it to fly away in a whimsical gust of wind!
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