I recently crocheted myself an ear warmer, and I thought when I made it I knew what I was doing. I turned out I still had more to learn.

I had some gorgeous yarn that had been an impulse buy years earlier, and I had been unable to find exactly what I wanted in the many tens of thousands of crochet ear warmer patterns available online, so I decided to design a new ear warmer that more closely aligned with my own crochet ear warmer ethos and which would highlight the beauty of the yarn. Little did I know I would once again be drawn in by the dark art of doing and redoing.

The design I came up with was simple to make, looked good, and fit me well — or so I thought.

Pleased with my creation, I wore the ear warmer out in the world where there was a lot of weather (which was the reason I made it the first place), not the least of which was a breeze so stiff (it was really more of a wind) that it caught the ever-so-slightly ruffled edge of my newly crocheted ear warmer.

The ruffling was slight enough that I had been able to ignore it when I crocheted the piece, but now that I was out in the world actually wearing it, the wind was able to find and catch that ever-so-slightly ruffled edge and nearly blow the ear warmer off my head.

I managed to keep it on, but I realized that the ruffled edge (however slight) was a bug, not a feature. It seemed that all of my doing needed some redoing.

So with some sorrow and much hesitation, I unwove the ends and frogged the whole thing:

Not pleased at having had to frog the ear warmer, I was anxious to crochet a second one with the modifications necessary to get a good fit, so I got to work, and by late afternoon, I had gotten this far:

The modifications I have made are small, but the impact should be pretty big. When all is said and done, I should have a well-fitting ear warmer that won’t fly off my head when I most need it, and when I get the pattern written, I will be providing other crocheters the opportunity to learn from my mistakes instead of having to make their own.