Tunisian in the round - Purple Swirls hat

I wanted to do a variation of the bottom-up Tunisian hat I'd made before.  Part of what I wanted to do was see how far I could go with the Tunisian stitch decrease rounds before I had to stop using both ends of the hook and switch to regular crochet to close up the top.

For the yarn, I went with Bernat Alpaca in Plum and Lavender and worked with a 6.50mm double ended hook. 



I also wanted to make the hat larger than the first one I'd made, so I started with a base chain of 70 in the darker colour.  This photo is after about 5 rounds in Tunisian Simple Stitch.





A closer look at how the side was building up.






Though this is what I was actually working with.  The tight curl makes it quite the challenge to work with!  It also made it a challenge to judge when to start decreasing my rounds for the crown of the hat.  I wanted to make sure it was a deeper hat then previous, and had to keep resisting the urge to start the decrease rounds too early.






Here you can see the first few decreased rounds.  Since I started with 70 stitches, I worked the decrease stitches evenly in sevenths, so the first decreased round brought the stitch count down to 63, then 56, and so on.



 

I changed where I worked the decreased stitches compared to the first hat I'd made.  Instead of starting the new decrease in the same place as previous round's decrease, I started the decrease one stitch ahead of the previous decrease. ( I hope that makes sense!)  This caused the distinctive swirl to form in the opposite direction from the previous design.

I was also quite surprised to be able to work the Tunisian stitch pretty much to the end.  By that point, I was switching back and forth on the ends of my hook every couple of stitches.  The final bit was closed up while sewing in the yarn ends to finish them off.

For some reason I can't remember anymore (I actually finished this some 3 months ago), I didn't take any step by step photos of the rest.  Oops.

While the body of the hat was worked in a spiral, the base was worked in joined rounds, using only one end of my double ended hook.  The first round was just single crochet into the remaining loops of the foundation chain, working from the outside of the hat.





This view shows the transition from working the body of the hat in a spiral from the foundation chain to joined rounds, where it looks a bit like a bump.






After joining the first round of single crochet, I turned the piece to work from the inside for the double crochet bobbles.  The bobbles are 3 double crochet together, separated by one double crochet.  After joining the round I turned to work from the outside again and worked three rounds of single crochet, with the lighter purple in the middle round, without turning until the end of the third round of single crochet.  Another round of bobble stitches was worked from the inside, then the last round was done in single crochet from the outside.






That last round of single crochet pulls the edge in quite nicely, making for a snug and comfortable fit. 

I'm quite happy with this version.