A Crocheted Lace Bathing Cap

Doesn't my granddaughter, Lena, look darling in this crocheted bathing cap?  I got her a swim suit and cover up for her first birthday.

But I wanted to get her a cap too. There was nothing at the store, so I decided to crochet her a cap made of nothing but simple chain stitches!  My sister showed me one and I sort of just made it up on the fly.

Mine didn't come out flat, but it looks a lot like an old fashioned bathing cap which worked perfectly!  I used cotton yarn rather than acrylic and a G hook.

She looks cute in these pictures, but I can tell you, it took a lot of work to get her all dressed up.  I forgot how challenging it can be to use a busy toddler for a model!  Christian, my talented photographer son, took these photos for me. (He's 15 and has a photo blog...www.mipixx.blogspot.com)

I will have a video of how I crocheted this cap uploaded shortly.  I started out with a string of about eight chain stitches which I closed off into a circle with a slip stitch. Then I crocheted 7 more chain stitches and attached them to the circle about four loops over.

I repeated this until I had five loops on the circle and it looked kind of like a daisy on top.  Then I made 6 more chain stitches and attached the string to  the middle of the first 'petal'.  This wasn't a perfectly symmetrical process. But it served my purpose.

Then I just kept crocheting 6 stitches and attaching it with a single crochet (stitch 7) to the next petal.  For the first couple of times around (rows) I attached the strings in the ditch and then on the top of the loop alternating...ditch, loop, ditch, loop, to widen the base and keep the circle flat.  Eventually, it stayed fairly flat by just always attaching the chain string to the tops of the loops. 

Then after I had about a 12" flat circle, I crocheted a chain of stitches about twice that long and wove it in and out of the loops about 2 inches in from the outer edge just like I described on an earlier post for a colonial style baby cap. I pulled the ends to gather the cap and tied them into a bow.

Isn't she a cutie?!