Monday, October 10, 2016

A Crochet BB8 Hat for an Infant


With my grand plans to make Lucky and Rowdy into R2D2 and BB8 for Halloween, I need something to transform their little heads.  Why not kill two birds with one stone and make them crochet hats that complete their Halloween costumes AND will work as winter hats?


There are multiple free patterns for a BB8 hat but I picked the following free crochet BB8 hat knitting pattern.  I used a size H (5.0 mm) crochet hook and KnitPicks Wool of the Andes worsted weight yarn in the colors white (25 g, 55 yards), Coal (3 g, 7 yards), Orange (5 g, 11 yards) and Silver (9 g, 20 yards).

I was a little concerned about sizing for the hat.  The last time I tried a hat on Rowdy it was in in June when I used him for a size model with the wolf hat.  I can compare the stitches in this pattern to the 6-9 month size hat I made earlier to get something that should fit Rowdy in a month and a half.  I want to err on the size of a larger hat so that it might last for part of the winter, too.  The hat pattern is sized for age 10 - Adult, but I think I can modify this with a repeat crafterme base hat in size 12 month.


The 9-12 month hat has 13 DC rounds and one SC round.  The BB8 hat has 19 DC rounds and 1 SC round.  I modified the striping pattern as follows:
  • 3 rounds white
  • 2 rounds gray
  • 1 round white
  • 1 round orange
  • 5 rounds white
  • 1 round colorwork orange & white (54sts total.  I think I was supposed to end up with 56 sts so I'm not quite sure what happened.) - Ch2 white, 1 DC White, 1 Orange, (1W, 4O, 1W, 1O)*2, 1W, 4O, 13W, (1O, 1W, 4O, 1W)*3.  Join.  
  • SC gray

The original BB8 pattern gives instructions for the circles and the striped hat base.  It does NOT provide instructions for the colorwork in the last 2 rows.  I haven't done a lot of crochet colorwork, only the face of a crochet penguin many years ago, but I know that the stitches are not quite a grid. I decreased the last two rows to a single row for Rowdy's hat since I needed to size it down, so I didn't have to worry about aligning crochet colorwork rows this time.


For the large circle I didn't want it to be quite as large as for the adult sized hat so I crocheted two DC rounds of black (instead of 3) before the HDC white round.


This crochet BB8 hat was a fast project for a day when Lucky was at school. Rowdy is not quite mobile yet so he is pretty content sitting scooting around on his bum or bouncing in his jumper.   This allows me to have some crochet time while he is awake.  It is pretty fun to sing and chat to him while I'm working with yarn.  It will be hard once he is crawling and walking because then he won't let me have these still (not quiet!) days with him.


Now I just have to finish the rest of his costume!


Check out this little cutie!  


I love that I have a little crochet for his Halloween costume.  Plus he can wear this hat the rest of the winter!

Sneak peek to Lucky's hat.  Stay tuned for the next post!