Beginning the Bouclé Beanie

In the last post you saw the sketch of my idea for a beanie with a bouclé brim, and you read about my confessed insanity of creating the crocheted bouclé yarn by hand.

Here's the hat progress so far. This is the crown of the hat before felting, modeled by the lovely Valerie:


After vigorous felting and much dye loss out of this commercial yarn by Malabrigo, the crown looked like this as it dried on the hat block:


After it the crown had dried (and stained the heck out of my lovely hat block) it looked like this on Valerie:


Now I need to do some swatching to decide if I want to crochet or knit the brim and in which stitch pattern.