This weekend ushered in a cold snap, the likes of which are usually reserved for January.

As the weekend wore on, the mercury dipped, lower, then lower still. The increasingly cold temperatures inspired me to spend most of my time indoors crocheting hats and turned it into a two-hat weekend.

First up was a hat I began last week..

Intended for my youngest son, it was my first attempt to use two colors for the crochet seafarer’s cap designed by Beth Hall. Created with mariners in mind, Ms. Hall’s design is elegantly simple and results in a very warm hat, so I thought it would be ideal for some of the very cold mornings that lie ahead.

Here is how far I had gotten when the weekend began:

and here is a photo of the finished product:

For reasons that the use of two colors cannot explain, I made a number of errors while crocheting this hat. So many, in fact, that the number of rows I had to frog and rework nearly amounted to enough stitches to make another hat.

But that is not how frogging works, and because of the myriad mistakes I made while crocheting the hat for Max, it was with some trepidation that I got out a 5.5 mm hook, and began work on the weekend’s second hat.

It was however as if I had exorcized a number of error demons while crocheting my son’s hat, and my next experiment (using an I hook to create a larger hat without otherwise changing the pattern) went well, and after investing only a third of the time I had put into my son’s hat, the new, slightly larger hat was done:

Here is how the two hats looked when proximate to one another:

When I begin work on a project, I do what I can to anticipate and avoid any potential problems I might encounter, but the truth is that I cannot foresee and avoid every problem that might occur, and it is in solving those problems that I learn the most — not only about my craft, but about life.