December 2, 2002.
Chunky Weave


I finally finished the hat! It's the hat I started crocheting last Christmas, when my sister-in-law gently pushed a ball of soft colorful yarn into my hands and showed me how to form an easy loop with a bright orange crochet hook.

That was last December. As soon as she left the room and went back to her home three time zones away, I forgot how to work the crochet hook and discarded the misshapen little hat, which sat only one-third finished in a heap on my bookshelf for eleven-and-a-half months.

But the good thing about the holidays is that my sister-in-law usually drops by Georgia at some point. And she brings great craftiness with her. She is an amazing girl. She walks, and bunnies and squirrels follow in her wake. She whistles a bright song, and little birds come to land on her finger, and she borrows a tailfeather from them, and fashions home-made Christmas stockings from their borrowed down. She is one of those people who can make anything with her hands, you know, a girl who could not only replicate the Christmas tree on the cover of Martha Stewart Living, but could beautifully trim her own tree, one that would actually turn Martha celadon green with envy.

So she came back this year and helped me finish the hat. I had figured that it would be a cool thing to make a hat, you know — I envisioned myself walking the streets of downtown Atlanta in the cold, shouldering my way through the crowd, sporting my hat with its fashionably J. Crew-esque chunky weave. Someone would shout, "Nice lid, girl!" and I would just wink at them and shoulder on, and it would be my little happy homemaker secret that the hat was actually of my own creation, and not from a J. Crew sweatshop in Tierra del Fuego.

But now that the hat is finished, I have realized that it just makes me look really silly, like I have a big chunky, woven coconut for a head. Observe the hat in action:



Now, it is very warm, and it snuggles down over my ears enough to do double duty as earmuffs. And when I pair it with the incredibly long scarf that Alicia crocheted for me last Christmas (see below; you can't tell here, but the scarf must be 11 feet long, not kidding, she must think that I am an Amazon), I am almost ready for snow flurries. Yeah. Bring it on.


Regardless of how the hat looks, I did enjoy making it. I fell back into step with the crochet loop, and relished the feeling of doing something useful with my hands. On Thursday night, after the Thanksgiving dishes had been cleared away, and the dishwasher was gurgling away, all the women sat and talked by the fireplace, and I worked my ball of yarn, and periodically tried on the still-forming hat for them.


Yeah, it looks pretty goofy, but I'll wear it anyhow, because for whatever reason, wearing a silly homemade hat makes me feel like the step-daughter of Holden Caufield's sister Phoebe. I can really get into that.