Did I back away from the crochet? No. I went and crocheted the hat again.

You see, I decided to search for the pattern in Ravelry, and found it. There was a link to a different errata page which belongs to the designer. Now, the two corrections on it didn’t reveal why my hat was wonky, but in reading them I discovered I’d been missing a chain stitch in the rounds of the top. So, of course, I had to see if this fixed the problem I’d been having, so I picked up the hook and another two balls of yarn and tried again.

It did fix the problem… though I ended up with a weird bump around where the rounds joined…which I didn’t get the first time around but as far as I can remember I did exactly the same thing. Well, I figured I could just push the bump in to become a dip and nobody would notice, it being on the top of the hat and me being relatively tall.

Then I found my second oopsy. I had missed the “continue in a spiral” instruction for the sides. This is almost as bad as missing the “at the same time” instruction in knitting. Of course there’ll be no wierd round joining distortion if there’s no round joining. Silly me.

So, boosted by the knowledge I’d fixed two problems and the third wouldn’t be visible, I ploughed through to the brim.

Then I tried it on. That’s when I discovered two things: that I’d missed three rounds on the sides and the hat was too shallow, and… well… it looked wrong.

This time the wrongness wasn’t wonkiness. The hat was working out okay (if you ignored the wierd dip on top and I frogged back and added the missing rounds). What was wrong was that it didn’t looking right. As a cowboy hat it just wasn’t convincing, and I don’t think adding the brim would have made any difference. I suspect that a) the yarn doesn’t suit the project, and b) cowboy hats look stupid on me.

So it’s frogging time again.

But, to be philosophical, it kept me entertained for several nights, I got a bit more practise in reading crochet patterns, and now know to avoid cowboy hats. I haven’t lost the itch to crochet or to make quirky hats, either. And there’s this cadet style hat I’ve had my eye on for a while that would work well in a tweedy denim cotton…