This week I have another hat made with 100% viscose rayon straw type fiber. The book uses HiStraw made by Columbia-Minerva. I guess rayon raffia was popular in the early 70s. Here is the front and the back of the booklet. I went with the "Anne" hat (upper right in second photo) because I wanted something with more of a brim. This fiber isn't super scratchy but I don't think the granny square hats look very comfortable and I didn't have enough colors to make the other options. The pattern asks for seven skeins of HiStraw in tan and three in brown. I had neither of those colors so I mixed up some different brands and went with two StrawTex white, five HiStraw natural, one HiStraw light blue and one Swistraw in a yellow-orange color. The Swistraw had this description on the label, "WONDERFUL, WASHABLE SWISTRAW Ribbon is a remarkably versatile viscose rayon strand - durable, soil and fade resistant, and it may be washed, dry cleaned, ironed and steamed (handle as synthetic textile). It is available in many dazzling colors in brilliant and matt finishes...ideal strand for many craft and needlework projects - freeform and loom flowers, crocheting, stitchery, weaving, lampshade wrap, macramé, gift packaging ties, embedding in resin." This was a pretty easy pattern once I got past some odd instructions where they had you doing a row into the base of the previous row. It made the inside look like this and the only reason I could come up with for this was to give it a little more structure. This is done for three different rows in the head portion and in every row for the brim. They suggest a G hook and give the same gauge as the previous hat but for some reason I needed to go up a hook size to get the gauge right. About halfway through the sides of the hat it still looked a little smaller than I thought it should so I upped the hook size again to an H. This hat has you crochet over some round elastic to make sure the hat will stay on and that worked pretty well.
I will say that this isn't the easiest stuff to work with but it isn't as bad as I thought it would be. It takes a little more wrist twist to get the full strand in the hook sometimes and my hands get a little more tired than they do with regular yarn. The results are pretty good though and it makes a nice lightweight summer hat. I'm happy with how it came out and it fits so I'll give this one a 5 star rating.
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AuthorI'm from Minnesota and have been crocheting since 2003. I inherited a box full of Workbasket Magazines from my mother-in-law and became obsessed with the vintage patterns. Archives
December 2024
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