Warm reversible crochet hat to help the homeless

Having made some tiny hats for the Innocent Big Knit, I decided to scale up my charity knitting to make a hat for the Olann and Warm + Woolly campaign to make hats for the homeless which ran in 2015. 

I decided to crochet the Reversible Strands crochet hat pattern by Nancy Smith (now a paid pattern available from Ravelry).

Pattern Modifications for DK yarn

I used DK yarn rather than Aran/Worsted, so I made the following adjustments to end up with a man’s size hat:

• I used a 5mm crochet hook with double knit wool.
• I did 2 extra sets of increases, ending up with 42 fpdc rather than 30. So instead of stopping increasing after round 6, I did 4 more rounds.
  For round 7 & 8, there were 4 repeats between each increase, and then for round 9 & 10, there were 5 repeats.
• After round 10, my circle was roughly 6.5 inches in diameter.
• Moving on to the straight cables, I did this for round 11-18 rather than round 7-16, due to my earlier adjustments.
  If making again, I would add a couple of rounds in the main brown colour (do round 11-20 here instead).
• I then followed the 4 stripe rows as per the pattern & finished off with 9 rounds of the alternate beige colour (rounds 23-31), before the final sc round 32 to finish.
  If making again, I would decrease this to 7 rounds, having added 2 extra rounds of the main brown colour above the stripe instead.

The hat is quite stretchy, so the above method fits a man’s head, but would also be OK for me if the hat was just made a bit shorter. The reversible nature of the pattern means that you can choose to have the either the raised ribbing on the outside (picture above) or have a smooth look instead (below).