Hats by Elvee
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Increasing One's Crochet Vocabulary

7/31/2015

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Picture
This week I tested a crochet pattern by a fellow designer on Ravelry.

The Minion Banana Cozy was definitely outside my crochet comfort zone: It had short rows, a tight gauge, small parts.

But he was so darn cute. 




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The Retroactive Magic Loop

7/21/2015

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One of the testers of my new pattern mentioned that he wished he'd started his hat with a Magic Loop: the starting chain-ring was too loose.

I suggested to dgou -- his name on Ravelry -- that he use the yarn tail to weave through the stitches in the first round, and then pull it tight.  It would create an After-the-Fact Magic Loop.

He liked the idea and even coined a new name for it: The Retroactive Magic Loop.  (Thanks, dgou!)

I almost always finish off my hats with a Retroactive Magic Loop.  So easy.  More photos are here.



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When a Critic Tells You What You Need to Know

7/20/2015

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I asked my sister, an artist, what she thought of the cover-page photo of my new pattern. 

"It's OK," she said, clearly underwhelmed.

"What's wrong with it?"

"That hat has a giant splotch in the center.  It's really distracting."

Compared with the retake, I prefer the splotch photo.  It shows the stitches more clearly, and the lighting's better.

But sometimes you have to listen to your sister, who knows a thing or two about what's visually pleasing.  And what isn't.
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Stitch Diagrams Revisited ... and Revised

7/17/2015

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I've been conducting a test of a new pattern on Ravelry, and I discovered that there's no standardized name for half-double crochet's third loop.  That's the one behind the usual V-loops at the top of the stitch.




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Stitch Diagrams

7/13/2015

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Sometimes I worry that my photo illustrations of stitches might be hard to read simply because yarn tends to be fuzzy.

So I went to the kids' crafts department at Jo-Ann Fabrics yesterday, and I found some thin cording.  It seemed to me that this plastic spaghetti would be more "legible" in a diagram.

The cording had been cut into short-ish lengths, so each row of crochet took a separate piece.

Here's the result being photographed:
 
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For the photo, I taped the unruly plastic swatch to a sheet of paper.  I turned the photo into a sketch in Picasa, where I also added the title and explanatory text.  Then I used Paint to add the back-loop arrows.  The finished diagram is at the top of this post.

For comparison's sake, here's an earlier effort with yarn:

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Photo Shoot

7/8/2015

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I take the photos for my Etsy shop and for my patterns in front of this window.  I use a point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix camera, which I bought about five years ago.

Usually, the table is more cluttered than this, but it always has the comb on it -- a mannequin's wig gets messed up every time you take her hat off.  (And sometimes the wig comes off, too.)  Another fixture is the decorative box that a friend gave me.  I use it to rest my elbows on when I shoot.  And to store the comb.

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More Green, Please

7/3/2015

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In my Etsy shop, my stock of hats made from recycled yarn seems to keep dwindling.  This is a good time of year -- the off-season for hats (except in places such as Australia, for instance) -- to make more. 
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    Author

    Crochet designer
    Elvee Dickinson:
    "Here you'll read about my discoveries related to crochet, hats, and the crochet hat world. 
    (Yes, there is a crochet hat world....)" 
    January 2022 update: "I'm adding more knit patterns in the coming months and will also have things to say about knitting, hats, and the knitted hat world...." 

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