fruit hats

Lately I've been crocheting hats. Mostly because summer is too hot to have afghans on my lap while working on them, but also, it seems to be baby/toddler mania in my life right now, and those little buggers are great guinea pigs for hats. The fruit hat craze started with my youngest, Kayla. The shirt I picked for her one year pictures reminded me of watermelon colors, so I created the watermelon hat for her. This snowballed into one for my 3 year old, my 6 month old niece, a co-workers 2 grand-daughters, another niece, and so on.
The basic concept is this: (I use about an I hook and medium tension) with pink yarn, chain for however long it takes to go the circumference of the child's head. (approximately 55 ch.) sl stitch to connect ends of chain and continue on to DC in each chain until you loop back around to the start, then procede DC onto the first row of DC. this forms a spiral. continue with the DC spiral until tube is long enough to extend from top of head to brow bone (approx. 15 rows). end spiral by decreasing to HDC then to SC then tie off ends. switch to white yarn, tie onto last stitch of pink, ch. 2 and alternate around the tube 2 DC in first stitch then 1 DC in next stitch, then 2 DC in next stitch then 1 DC in next, . . . . . you get the picture, until back to start of white. (this starts the flare edge on the brim of the hat) sl. stitch into first white stitch and tie off. switch to green yarn. start the same way as you did for the white yarn. alternate first row of green onto white stitches as follows, 1 DC in first stitch, 1 DC in second stitch, 2 DC in third. repeat pattern all the way around. slip stitch into first green st., ch. 2 and finish with final row of green 1 DC per stitch until all the way around, sl. st. to the first st. in row and tie off.
Now for the finishing touches, go back to the start of the pink, weave about 8" length of cut yarn through the row of ch.. pull taught to gather top and tie off.
use approx. 6" of brown yarn lengths to tie around stitches periodically on pink work area to simulate watermelon seeds. (ribbon would work well, too)

This concept can be used for other hats as well. An example is the kiwi hat I made for my niece. the only difference is that on the final row of brown I added fun fur yarn to the brown and crocheted with both strands at once. I didn't want a completely fuzzy edge so by keeping the brown acrylic in there, it muted the fuzzy factor a bit.