Project Notes: Matching Crochet Joanie Reversible Beanies for Father and Son

Every couple years, I like to make my husband and son a matching beanie set. They were due for a new one, so I decided to make them with my recent Joanie Reversible Beanie pattern.

The pattern was originally written for sport weight yarn, but after the testing period and feedback from some of the lovely testers, I added in a guide for adapting the pattern to any yarn size/gauge. So for the boys’ beanies I used my own guide and made their beanies with Caron Simply Soft worsted weight acrylic yarn. (This is a great acrylic yarn option, by the way. Soft, as it’s accurately named, and in lots of color options. I used to use this yarn when I sold made-to-order accessories and still have a lot in my stash that I use often for baby gifts and projects like these hats.)

The stitch used for the Joanie Reversible beanie makes a dense, squishy fabric that makes for a super warm, cozy hat, which is great for the dry, cold winter days we have here.

You can see I had a lot of fun with their patches. I used some scrap suede and added some embroidery using DMC embroidery thread. For my son, I embroidered a cute little stegosaurus. My husband is a chemist, currently working in food chemistry, so I thought it would be fun to ask him if he wanted to pick a square of the periodic table of elements for me to embroider onto his beanie’s patch, because of the square shape. He picked this one – tantalum: “a rare, hard, blue-gray, lustrous transition metal that is highly corrosion-resistant,” if you’re curious – because his name is Tanner.

This was my first experience embroidering on suede/leather, and while I think the stegosaurus turned out okay, the Ta square could be better if I was more practiced in embroidering on leather. The rounded number and letter were the trickiest and could look better, in my opinion, but the design overall is still understandable. I do have a leather needle, so that helped the basic process.

For the stegosaurus, I actually drew out the design on the back of the suede square in sharpie to follow as I embroidered. For the Ta square, I drew out a sketch on paper to try and get the placement of the letters and numbers right, then lightly drew that onto the suede with a similar-colored pen and embroidered over it.

A closer look at the stegosaurus embroidery, because it’s so cute. I knew it worked because when my son saw it, he knew immediately what it was.

I think they also look cute with my original Joanie beanie sample, too! ( I skipped the granny squares on the boys’ Joanies, since the main idea on theirs’ were the embroidered patches.

I’m so happy with how these turned out, and my husband and son like them, too!

If you’d like to make your own Joanie Reversible Beanie, you can find the pattern in my Ravelry shop here. and you can see a styling post featuring the beanie here.

This post contains a few affiliate links. Find out more about that here.