a felted thing

Most of the time, I believe this Thing I'm going to show you to be a hat, or a cap. But I'm not sure.
It began as one of my organic hats (okay, it's freeform I suppose, but I always like to make up other ways to talk and think about things...) and it turned out to be just way too big and I've always wanted to try to felt some freeform/organic work. There's a lot of wool in this piece, but some synthetic, and often felted crochet turns out a bit hole-y, so I didn't have high hopes, just regular ol' hope for it to become...interesting. And smaller.

So here is the Thing when it was finished being crocheted. I did this one differently than all the other hats I made a few weeks ago, in that I joined in several smaller bits -okay, they're "scrumbles" I guess, but my bits don't really look scrumbly, with many different yarns, stitches, directions. Mine are usually just spiral-y bits with a couple of different yarns, mostly in single crochet with a few half-double crochet and double crochet stitches thrown in.

Anyway, just way too big:

So I decided to felt it, as I most like to felt, by hand at the kitchen sink. I love this picture of the water spray drenching the piece:
And here I am tormenting it into changing:
into this:
Definitely smaller and I was very pleased that it did not become too hole-y, probably because of my preference for single crochet.

As it dried and tightened up a bit more, I began to wonder if it was, indeed, a hat. The brim just didn't look right. And I began playing with it, as a sculpture or vessel:
And then, eureka, I folded under that annoying brim-thing and loved this and thought, lo, it is indeed a vessel:
But then, it started looking like a hat to me again: