The Finished Baseball Hat

Last night, I finished the stitching on the baseball hat! After repeating to myself about two dozen times that it doesn't have to be perfect, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. :) I'm glad that the hat itself turned out cute, though, cause otherwise I don't think this would have been sellable to anyone who wasn't...me. :)

Last night, when I modeled it in the mirror, I wore it with the stitches in front:


However, when I showed it to my friend Jen, she seemed to think I should wear it the other way around:


It doesn't matter much, except I want to put the Mets logo on the front, and I can't do that until I decide which way is the front...

Anyway, here's the hat:

I'm pretty pleased. Really. Meanwhile, I took a few new pics of the dolls that I haven't sold yet, but the light wasn't quite right so I'm still not happy with them; I'll have to redo them again, or come up with some better way to take pics. I know what I have to do (some muslin, some lamps...) but I just haven't gotten around to it. Sounds like a task for when I get back...

Also, I'm glad that I got the hat done. Tomorrow is my last night in NYC before October, and I have tickets to tomorrow's game, which means it'll be the last game I get to see before the end of the baseball season (or at least, the end of the part of the baseball season that involves my Metsies). Even though I go through this every year, I know I won't realize how much I love watching baseball until the season is over, and I won't get to watch it again until spring training starts in March. It's surreal to think that this season is almost over already, and all the hopes and fears and questions that started it are no longer relevant, and it's time to start building up next year's stock...are any of you sports fans? What sports do you watch? Baseball is my favorite, though I'm going to try to get in to football this year, just to fill the void left by the off-season...I also like soccer, almost anything in the Olympics, and...well, the last year or so, I'll watch almost any sport I can find, though there are still plenty I've never seen (like Rugby and Lacrosse!) :) Do you express your fandom through crafts? I'd love to see what others have made! :)

Crocheting the Baseball Hat, Part 2

Last night, I did a bunch more work on the hat that I was planning. I finished the hat itself, and realized that even sans baseball stitches, I'd managed to make a pretty adorable hat:



I also realized that if I'm going to keep making hats, I'm going to need to get a styrofoam model, because the lighting in my bathroom is absolutely not adequate to take good pictures, and I'm not a very good model anyway. All in all, it was nice to see how cute the hat was before I added the stitches, though, because now I think that rather than sell the pattern with the hat stitches (which I was worried about not selling, as "women who are crazy enough to wear a hat that looks like a baseball" is a pretty niche market, the hat is too feminine for a man, and I have no clue how to size it for a kid), I can instead market it as just a cute hat, and if I make a second model with, say, a little crocheted flower, I can show how people can customize it to their hearts content - and making a second model will give me the chance to make a "small" size, so that the pattern with include a small, medium and large.

Speaking of which, the one in the images is (accidentally) a large - it's definitely a size too big for me - but I figure that's okay, it's still nice and comfy, and because I made the mistake, I know how to change the pattern easily to make a medium.

Once I finished doing that, I moved on to trying to add my baseball stitches. First, I had to measure everything out, which proved to be time consuming and require a lot of counting, a long piece of yarn, and pins. But when all was said and done, I was happy with my template:
Angle one (front):


Angle two (side):


I then started the little crisscrossing stitches in red, using the pinned on line as a guide, but I immediately realized that wasn't quite right. So instead, I grabbed some black yarn, and replaced my model line with black, and stitched the red stitching through the black. I got about half way through the hat before I finally got sick of working on it for the evening and stopped. No pictures of the version with stitching yet, I'll wait until it's done tomorrow.

All in all, working on this hat has taught me a few valuable lessons. For example, it doesn't look like I expected, but I'm actually happier with it this way, I think it's cuter than the original plan. I also learned about sizing. But the most important thing was taught by doing the stitching. Ya see, the stitching isn't perfect, and I'm a real perfectionist. It's not evenly spaced, they're all slightly different sizes, and all in all it looks a little...I don't know...amateur. I was pretty frustrated last night. But when I looked at it this morning, especially from a distance, I felt much better about it: it's not perfect, but it's very cute, instantly recognizable, and I don't think most people would mind the lack of perfection, because it...it just works. At least I think so! I should be done by tomorrow, so I look forward to finding out if others think it works, too! ;)