I’ve been crocheting for about 46 years. I got by with the basics for a long time. Made lots of afghans and scarves and doilies. Socks and slippers were a mainstay for a while. Tea pot cozies and toaster covers were popular once. I made a couple of rugs too.
Last year, I learned how to make hats. Well, one kind of hat anyway. This year, I branched out and did things a little differently, but I was still using only the basic stitches: chain, slip stitch, single crochet, half double crochet, double crochet and treble crochet. Well, not all in one hat.
I never really tried any of the fancy stitches (except for maybe clusters and puffs, well and front and back post double crochets) because I’d done so well with the basics. But lately, I’ve fallen in love with the Alpine Stitch and the Moss Stitch. I haven’t quite gotten the hang of the Star Stitch. And I’ve yet to try the Iris Stitch, but it looks very pretty.
So I decided to make a hat using the Moss Stitch. I had no real idea how it would work up, but I liked the look of the sample I made.
I used the front and back post double crochet to get a rib knit look to the bottom band of the hat. I worked it flat and then joined it into a circle. Then I did a row of half double crochets in a different color around the band. From there I started the Moss Stitch which is ridiculously simple. You do a single crochet and then chain one. Skip the next stitch from the one you put the single crochet in and make a new single crochet and then chain one. For the next row, you make a single crochet in the chain one space and chain one over the single crochet from the previous row. That’s really all there is to it. But it makes this really nice texture.
Because I had no idea how to decrease in the Moss Stitch, I decided to gather the top. Instead of gathering it at the last row and adding a pom-pom on top as I did for the Christmas hats I made, I gathered it further down in the body of the hat.
But that looked too plain. So I looked online to learn how to make a flower. Turned out there was a really simple to make flower that looked pretty awesome. I sewed that onto the side of the hat next to the base of the gathers and voila!
I gave this first Moss Stitch hat to my husband to take to work and give to a fellow employee. It was her birthday. It’s nice when your experiment turns out well the first time. I’ve had my share of failures that I had to take apart and start over. But one of the nice things about crochet is that you can do that. Very little yarn gets wasted.
I might make another hat this way in a different color combination. I might keep that one.
Courtesy of Happily Hooked
Maddie's Mom Writes 