Embroidery on Crochet: Children’s Hats

My mom and my sister are pretty proficient with the crochet hook. I am not. I can crochet, but normally, the product looks like some abnormal growth from the Depths of Beyond. But my mom can wield a crochet hook with skill, and lately she’s been playing around with little winter hats for her granddaughters.

When you see little winter hats for little girls and wee babies, do you automatically think “Embellish!”? Admittedly, I do. So I duly confiscated one of the hats and started playing around with some embellishment.

Embroidering on crochet is not entirely easy, but isn’t all that difficult, either. This first bit is only a test. I wanted to see if my idea for flowers on these cute ruffled hats would work. And it does work, but I think it would work better with other materials. I’m planning on doing a little testing, using stuff like tear-away stabilizer and felt.

I’ll also use completely different threads. The center and petals on the Test Hat are worked with #8 perle cotton. I wanted to work with regular #3 perle cotton, so I dug through my stash looking for some. The Irony Monster struck – I was absolutely flabbergasted when my foraging couldn’t produce one skein of #3 perle cotton. (I thought that’s why we build stash, for occasions like this?!?!)

Sorry for the over-exposure on the photo. The petals are woven picots, and the center is a ribbed spider web, but my next adventure on the test subject will include drizzle stitch and cast-on stitch, worked in loops. And then, of course, there’s the simple daisy stitch, which, in the right thread, would be darling on the hat! I’ve also got some ideas about a decorated brim and beads. But I think I’ll let that one brew a bit!

If my current ideas work out, I’ll take you through them step-by-step in the future.

And if they don’t work out, I’ll probably never mention this subject again! 🙂

Enjoy the weekend!