Find Paris Heart Tee above on Etsy.

The homespun look seems to be making a coming back couched as eco-conscious or upcycled fashion in response to global warming and our more frugal standards of living in these times.

Taking up knitting or crochet is like home cooking, you source the ingredients and tailor it to your needs, whether for health or performance. Fringe benefits also include brain fitness in learning anything new and the functional outcome of a new hat or scarf or potholder, fulfilling that need for novelty. It’s also a wonderful screen break as you wait for something to load or that chat bot to respond…

The crochet (or knit) hat can provide a solution to that awkward quarantine haircut while keeping one’s head warm. Over the holidays I tried knitting and crocheting hats and the latter has stuck. I’ve graduated since my bun beanie post to acquire more measured techniques of learning how to crochet hats by crocheting in the round.

As an online art instructor between semesters, I’m always on the lookout for a deal. I found a Craftsy deal for a premium annual membership at $5! I’m not sure how long the deal is for, but I rejoined January 3.

For the more methodical in their learning, Craftsy’s Crochet in the Round class with Kim Werker, provides a foundation for crocheting hats amongst other rounded crochet projects. Werker’s class provides stripped down projects that builds in complexity with each lesson. She identifies the attributes of various yarns to use based on performance. (Also, check out how to customize the size of the hat to your wearer’s head. Yes, you guessed it. There’s pi in the equation.)

[envira-gallery id=’615′]

The beanie, while charming in hiding the hair seems to emphasize the shape of your head. I sought a more casual forgiving shape that had that boho vibe and could accommodate different hairstyles beneath.

I’m a big fan of Free People, but find the price point a challenge. (Plus purchasing enough to cover shipping can be cost prohibitive for the seasonally employed, though I’m grateful for a job!) I got the crochet patterns for these two hats from crochet designer, Julie King’s book. She has a lovely blog with free hat patterns, gleefulthings.com. Tip: Be sure to understand what chain space means before you dive in. I didn’t figure it out until midway, but it wasn’t too glaring so I decided to just keep going; therefore, the second hat.

In the era of turning to Amazon for nearly everything, it feels like a miracle for an accessory of such pragmatic proportions in winter to materialize from yarn with a mere hook. For this lefty, crochet is a lot easier to mirror from videos. I also enjoy the texture of crochet and find it a lot faster to create than knitting. (To get faster results, just don’t do single crochet—that can be cumbersome!) As an overall newbie, I tend to make a lot more mistakes knitting than crocheting, and when I do, I find it a lot easier to undo and redo my crochet work. Also, as someone who has machine knitted before, I find hand knitting a lot of work for the amount of fabric made. Someone can rebut me here, as I haven’t yet tried the continental knitting technique yet…

My next project is to make crochet headbands for exercise. One of my favorite dance fitness instructors was sporting a fashionable functional headband on video which complemented his in-between hair…