When Lajla Nuhic finally finishes one of her meticulously hand-crocheted hats, she pops it onto her head and asks her husband and children a simple question: "Is it dead or alive?"

To the vivacious Sarajevo-born Nuhic, the single most important thing about her sculptural creations is that they have a life force all their own. "If you put love and good energy into your hats, it comes across," enthuses the chic, dark-haired artist, sitting outside Granville Island's Circle Craft Gallery, where her works sell. They'll also be featured at Circle Craft Christmas Market, which runs Wednesday to next Sunday (November 9 to 13) at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre.

These are not your granny's shapeless knitted tuques. Wielding such natural materials as silk, mohair, chenille cotton, and alpaca wool, Nuhic fashions fantastic new forms, from domes to tightly brimmed cloches, all boasting textural interest like knobs and wild noodles of yarn.

Look closely, and you'll see signs of her training as an architect. Her most elaborate work is a rounded hat topped with tubes that look like fingerless gloves; she calls it the Chimney. Another is a woven replica of Italy's Trulli houses, which look straight out of a fairy tale: the brown, dome-shaped cap with the white spire resembles the rounded stone roofs with their pinnacles.

Nuhic graduated in architecture in Sarajevo, then worked at a German firm for several years before coming to Canada. Here, she shirked her field of study due to the profession's daunting new technical realities: "The computer is not my world," she says. "In architecture, with its deadlines, it could mean nine or 10 hours in front of a computer. So I went back to doing those things I have always done with my hands." Nuhic found more pleasure in the manual work of building architectural models. But she had also continued the crocheting she'd done since she was a child and, at a friend's encouragement, began selling her hats about seven years ago.

Nuhic's influences range beyond just architecture. The work is elegant but organic too, celebrating the natural beauty of her yarns and conjuring such elements as flowers and sea life. (Some nubs resemble barnacles or tiny suction cups.) Her colours are drawn from the earth, too, centring on neutrals and brick reds, with the odd soft purple or bright leafy green.

Her love of handiwork is innate, she says, although crocheting has a long tradition in her native country. Now, "If my friends see me without the crochet hook and the yarn, they say, 'What's wrong with Lajla?'?" From the time she was a child, she would wake up in the morning and want to create something out of crochet. The same sense of wonder fuels her interest today: "It's making something from scratch. You have this ball of yarn and you have this hook and you finish the day with this nice, beautiful thing."

Nuhic thinks people's renewed appreciation for handmade items in this mass-produced era is one of the reasons her hats have been so successful; they are, in fact, the epitome of all that is fashionable, from the somewhat folkloric shapes to the wild, tactile textures and the guaranteed one-of-a-kind-ness of each design. "If you think about all the corporations and labels, you can buy the completely same things in London, back home, and Vancouver," Nuhic says. "This world has an enormous wish to have more personal, individual things." People are willing to pay for the artistry she puts into her headgear: the hats start at around $55 and can go as high as $200 for a complicated piece.

Nuhic can barely keep up with demand these days, but her craft is still fun for her-a fact that helps keep her designs so "alive". "I think it's still relaxing to me," she says, playfully pushing her fingers through the "chimneys" on her signature hat. "It brings me to a state of meditation, where my mind can be free, but not too free, because I need to be aware of the number of stitches. That's probably one of the reasons my hand never hurts-and I've probably made 5,000 hats by now."