I do apologise, again, for my absence from blogger land. There’s quite a lot going on here at the moment. In a nutshell, we’ve moved back to Johannesburg and are currently living with my parents (a big thank you to them!) while we are house hunting. Obviously this means that there’s not much time for crochet, although I am trying to get a bit done every day. I’m currently working on the lovely Pax Tunisian lace shawl by Aoibhe Ni. I’ll feature it once it’s completed.
Right now I’d like to share the lacy cowgirl hats I made as an order for a country style wedding though.
It all started a few months ago, when I got an email from Kay, who found me on the internet. She sent me a mail and asked whether I would be interested in making  cowgirl hats for two girls, who were going to be flower girls at a wedding. Initially I really didn’t want to do it because I didn’t have much time, I had just told Your Family magazine that I would design something for their January issue (you might think that meant I had a long time but the magazine goes to print two months before it hits the shelf!) but I also thought it might be quite an interesting project, so I said yes. I spent some time looking for patterns on Ravelry because I didn’t think I’d have the time to design my own hat. However, there were no patterns for lacy cowgirl hats that appealed to me and so I did end up designing my own. I’ve decided that I will sell the pattern but you’ll have to be a bit patient because I still need to scale it for different sizes. The two hats I made fit 8-10 year olds.
How cute are those girls in those hats? And Kay made the dresses herself!
A few stats on the hats for now: I used packaging twine, it was about the thickness of a DK yarn. One thing I learned is that packaging twine is NOT easy to work with and you can not use a wooden hook with it! Talking about hooks, I used a 5mm KnitPro SoftGrip hook and I would not recommend crocheting with packaging twine without a hook with a comfortable grip. Once the hats were done I stiffened them with wall paper glue, which actually worked really well. The stiffening isn’t really necessary because the hats do keep their shape when worn but Kay said that the girls would probably be carrying the hats, or have them hanging down their backs too, and I didn’t want the rims to flop around. I think if I make another one I will use more than one layer of wall paper glue to stiffen the rim even more.
So, there you go, two Lacy Cowgirl Hats made as a custom order. If you have any special items you would like made, send me a mail and I’ll see if I can help you out.