Crocheting a Toque

This week, I was able to make much more progress in my crocheting. As I mentioned I was going to do in my last post, I went to get bigger yarn and a bigger crochet hook. I landed on a 9.0mm hook and bulky yarn. Once I had purchased these materials, I decided to try and crochet something a bit easier than a granny square. I looked up a tutorial about how to crochet a toque and I got to work! I found the tutorial below on Youtube. The video was accessible with the subtitles available, however it would have been nice if the different steps had been marked as chapters on the video to make it easy to review past steps or jump to future steps. The pattern used in the tutorial was also linked in the caption of the video, allowing me to both read about the pattern and follow the steps laid out in the video. 

Similar to the granny square, the first step for this was creating a slipknot. After this, I had to chain 27. Then I learned a new stitch, the half double crochet. This involved looping the string on the hook and going back down the chain to insert the hook in one of the previous chains. I then had to hook the string, pulling it through the chain before hooking the string again to pull it back through the three loops on my hook. I was able to catch on to this pretty quickly. I then had to continue doing this up and down the chain until I had created about 25 rows. Once I had these, I was able to begin putting my toque together! I laid the material flat, folded it in half, and crocheted along one of the edges to create something that looked like a neck gaiter. After this, I had to use the string to loosely stitch through ribbed portions of the hat before pulling the string to bunch together the top. After this, I did some additional crocheting to ensure that the top of the hat stayed closed and to loop in the end of the yarn so that it would not hang out. After this, I flipped the toque inside out and it was finished! Since this was my first try, the top of the toque was a bit messy, and the pattern of the toque was not completely even. Overall, this process made me feel much more confident in my crocheting. I gave the toque to my mother, and I was happy to see that it seemed to be the right size! Next week I think that I will go back to trying to create a granny square in order to try and work towards my original goal of crocheting my dog a sweater.

Attached below are the photos of my mother with the toque I crocheted for her.