My first animal hat, but not my first hat. This hat will be for Ashlea, my guinea pig this time around. I misread the directions 3x for rows 3-5 and had to keep pulling them out, not sure why. I ended up just adding the increases to total the number of stitches for each row as I went. I kept coming up with crazy numbers when I followed the pattern….which is why I don’t usually follow a pattern and when I do never do I follow exactly. So night one only produced the most of the shell, I am on the decrease row now and need more fun fur. I’ll pick some up on the way home, the rest of the yarn I already had. I will most definitely add ear flaps to mine as well as I think the flaps and ties are part of the fun of a animal hat :)

I added a bit of an ear flap, just crocheted several dc, decreasing a bit each row, working hdc and sc on the start and ends of the rows to give it a tapered look. The fur yarn gives a lot of forgiveness. I doubled up the regular white yarn and the fur yarn and crocheted a chain then added a pom pom to the end of each. I used the black yarn and white fur yarn, wrapped it 33 times around my four fingers had my wonderful model up there tie it off for me then cut the loops and tied them to the ends of the chains I worked on the ear flaps. The hat is a monster, lol…kinda heavy and a bit bigger than I’d like but it’s still cute and fun and that was the point.