I have a long standing love of Bumble bees, starting with doing my Masters degree back in the day. I have been horrified of late to notice that I have seen less diversity in the species I see foraging. For the last two years, all the bumble bees I have seen at the village are the same species. I have not seen a Bombus terricola, the species I did my masters degree on for several years.

As a crafts person I have revisited bumble bees a couple of times, not as much as rainbows, but sometimes.This is a quilt I did in a mystery bag years ago. Different people made the squares for me and I put it together. I also have collected some bumble bee stuffies over the years and I have been putting stuffies as I come across them in the baskets I made.

I decided to do a hat with Welting Fantastic, pg 143. Barbara Walker mentioned that you could do it in two colours. I had black beside my chair and I thought the stripes in the pattern would go well in bumble bee colours. I liked the look of the scalloped bottom on the stitch picture in the book, so I thought a nice scalloped edge to frame the face with a flapper style hat might be good. On the opposite page from that stitch was Double Wing Pattern, pg 142 and I thought, great–wings for my bumble bee. I cast on 99 stitches and did two full repeats of the 12 row pattern and an extra 6 rows to finish it off. I then decreased to 96 for the double wing pattern (6 x 16 stitches). I did two full 10 row repeats before decreasing. I did 6 points of decrease and did a double decrease each time – slip 1, k2tog, psso instead of doing the third purl triangle in the pattern. Again I say…black hats are a bitch to photograph!