October is almost done and I’m winding down my spiral blog posts. I wanted to share a different sort of spiral with you all today. As you know I love crocheting in the round, it is a great way to create amazing borders on a project as well as a fun way to create shaping. Today I want to talk about continuous rounds in crochet.
Working a continuous round in crochet is often a spiral style. Especially when you are crocheting top down hats or amigurumi. When you work concentric rounds in crochet you join the first stitch to the last stitch of the round, but for continuous rounds you are working the rounds without joins and step-up to the first stitch of the next round after the last stitch of the previous round. Continuous rounds also eliminate those pesky seams. When working an increasing circle, like for the crown of a hat, your rounds look like a classic spiral.
My flat fuzzy friend is an example of a classic double crochet spiral worked as a continuous round, then surface crochet is worked to emphasize the spiral.
I used the classic double crochet spiral as a continuous round for my Simple Double Crochet Hat design as well. But I don’t really like how open the stitches are for a hat made with double crochet stitches. That open stitch work is great for a warm climate hat, but on my mountain I need something a little less breezy. This inspired me to start playing around with how to work a double crochet hat that didn’t have all the open spaces.
Last spring I bought a beautiful silk scarf with a rainbow of colors and decided I needed a hat to go with it. I had lots of fun selecting a yarn at the Longmont Yarn Shoppe that would match it. The selected yarn was Cosette by Dream in Color and is a glorious cashmere blend that was a delight to work with. My plan was to use the yarn to crochet a double crochet hat that used linked double crochet stitches.
I took that project with me on my trip to Philadelphia and Ireland. It was a great project to work on when traveling as it was small enough to fit in my carry-on for flights and my day-pack during our various bus trips. After a lot of experiments and little bit of frogging I finally settled on how I wanted the design to work.
The finished hat is my Snowy Rainbow Hat. The pattern is available for purchase in my Ravelry Shop. This pattern includes stitch charts and instructions on making the hat in various sizes.
I’m also teaching a class on working this hat at the Longmont Yarn Shoppe, Sunday, November 5th 12:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. (Mountain Time) {2:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Eastern; 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Central, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Pacific}. This class will be a hybrid class, so you can join me via Zoom or In-person. You can register for the Zoom seats here on the Longmont Yarn Shoppe website, and for the In-person seats here. For the class I recommend working with a solid color worsted weight yarn, the image above shows the hat worked in Berroco’s Ultra Wool. In class we will make a baby size hat so you can practice all the elements of making the hat and learning linked double crochet stitches in the round.
With cold weather and holiday gift giving right around the corner, hats are a great project to have in your works-in-progress. If you want to personalize your hat gifts you can have fun adding little embellishments. I love to add flowers to my hats or little snowflakes. For the younger members on my gift list I will sometimes turn a basic hat into a monster face. I made one for my nephew years back and when he outgrew it he asked me to turn it into a ball.
Mamas2Hands 