Taking a Shortcut

For four days all I needed to do, workwise, was read. Read, read, read… and take notes. So in the evenings I had mental energy left for wending down the complicated curves of the Stone Path Hat. It was a lot of fun and I’d like to do more crochet cabling again. I love doing cables in knitting, and I think I’m going to love it in crochet too.

I didn’t always manage to stick to the path, however. There are come crooked bits in there, but since it took me a couple of hours to do one repeat, and you can’t just drop stitches to fix errors in crochet, there was no way I was going to frog back a couple of hours work for a few misaligned stitches.

Yesterday it was back to the mentally challenging part of my work. Most of the mistakes happened in the repeat I did last night, so I stopped to try it on and consider how I’d proceed from here. I was about one repeat from a good hat length. The pattern has two options: leave the brim off or crochet one separately and stitch it on. I want a brim, but doing two more repeats – one to get to the brim and one for the brim – was going to take me another four or so hours and I could already see doing a repeat when mentally drained was a bad idea.

Looking at the pattern photo, I couldn’t help thinking it was a lot of work for a section of the hat where you don’t see the pattern because it’s covered by the brim. And the brim… the pattern isn’t as distinct there and really, brims can be rib, right?

So I decided to switch to a fake rib pattern of 2×2 straight cables and stitches for the rest of the hat, which I’m sure I can manage while mentally worn out. I had enough mental energy left to get the existing cables to either end neatly or form the new rib ridges. Tonight I should be able to crochet away in whatever mental daze I end up in.

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