Knitting: Baby Strawberry Hat

I came across this free baby berry hat pattern called Baby Berry Hat by a knitting blog called Random Stitches via a knitting/crocheting website called Ravely (a membership only website, but it's free) and I thought it looked easy enough to do so I thought I'd give it a try. To give you an idea what kind of a knitter I am and how easy this pattern was to knit, I grab my knitting needles maybe once a year and most of the time it's either a scarf or... a scarf. But I have in the past knitted a stockinette stitch hat, a scarf, leg warmers, attempted at a bathroom rug, a sweater, and dish rags. So I'm not a complete nincompoop, but I'm also not a committed knitter either as I don't usually finish any big projects.

This project I did finish. Twice! Each hat took about two days. I decided to make some changes though, I decided to make mine a strawberry and I added a third color, white, as seeds after about 10th row. I did contemplate black or brown for the seeds but they didn't look too good with the green I had picked out. I also chose to do the bigger sized hat by adding the recommended extra 8 stitches, but the hat still came out small for Caitlin (who turned one yesterday, by the way), about 16" circumference after the roll. I also added the white crocheted flower (I just googled how to crochet flowers, it's all over the internet). I used a safety pin to hold it in place because I wanted the option of not having it.

I followed the pattern and on the first hat I added the seeds by sewing it in. It looked OK but it was annoying counting the stitches and rows. So on the second try I knitted the seeds in, half way through the project I realized the seeds would have looked better as a purl instead of knit. So if I had to go for the third try I would purl, not knit the seed, and for Caitlin I would make the hat bigger, much bigger, adding about 3" more worth of stitches (I think that comes out to about 24 more stitches).