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Sharing the passion and soul of needlecrafts. |
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BOOK NOOK |
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Sharing the passion and soul of needlecrafts. |
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BOOK NOOK |
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Review by Nikki Adams Get Your Crochet On! Hip Hats & Cool Caps gives us modern, retro, hip, funky crocheted hats that are easy to make and work well for all hair types.
Afya Ibomu, it seems, has quite a wide-ranging clientele and there was a variety of looks for both men and women, many modeled by familiar famous faces like Common and Erykah Badu, who are her customers. So the hat styles come straight from the music videos to your hooks. As with many knit and crochet books, this book has an introductory section of about 40 pages. In it you can learn the basics of crochet, how to choose yarn, hooks, elastic, and button snaps, general instructions for making hat brims, earflaps, and the like, and how to care for your hat once made. There were several hats with short baseball-type bibs or all-around brims, a bun holder, a crocheted head wrap, tubular wraps for ponytails and locs, a visor, an openwork snood perfect for long locs or voluminous hair, and even a couple of brimless ones designed to fit close against the head. In the end I chose to make the newsboy-style hat called "Soon Come". It could be made in several sizes, which you adjust simply by changing the yarn weight and hook size. I followed the pattern as written with little difficulty, though there was a slight oddity about Rnd 7 and I urge you to, as you always should before starting a pattern, check for errata here: http://nattral.com/corrections.html . Overall, though, the pattern was really simple. I made one change. I wanted a hat that was big enough on top for me to fit all my hair in, so I needed a big top but a smaller bottom since my actual head is no bigger than average. I added a few decreases in the appropriate place. The one gripe I had with the patterns is that they have no final measurements. My hat could be made in small, medium, or large, but I couldn't find in the book what measurements those sizes corresponded to. So I had a couple of false starts before finally getting the size I wanted. All in all I really like this book. The photography is natural and taken just where you would wear these stylish but practical hats: out on the street and around town. The instructions are clear and the designs are modern (often in a retro sense) and varied, and summed up with a line from her Introduction describing her style as "a mix of street, hip-hop, '70s vintage, and new millennium." And while there are styles for any hair type, this one especially has a lot to offer for those of us who often get left out of other knit and crochet hat pattern books.
Get Your Crochet On! Hip Hats & Cool Caps by Afya Ibomu
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I'll admit that I normally don't pay the full retail price for a book.
But when I saw this book on the shelves of my LYS on knit night, I had to
buy it that very night. I have an afro, and most knit and crochet hat
patterns simply are not made for me. So when I saw that this book was
full of models with afros, twists, locs, and curls I was really excited.
It went home with me that night.