Squid Knits

posted by Diana

Fall is just around the corner, which means it's almost hat season. I think I've talked about my love of hats before on this blog, and I could go on (and on) but, instead of boring you, I'll dive right in to this week's project.

I made this hat a while back based on Barley by Tincanknits. I wish I could remember the yarn I used because it's 100% wool and still very soft. Plus I bought it from my local yarn shop, which tends to have higher quality yarns than big box stores. I was pleased with how this hat fit, but it was really plain... it needed a little something more to set it apart from all of the other hats in my collection.

Which is why I decided to put this thing on it. 

It's a squid! Or, at least, the beginnings of one. (Or a six-legged octupus, according to the pattern Demi Octopus by Jennifer Wang.) In the above picture, all I have completed is the head and one tentacle.

Let me tell you, those tentacles were a huge pain to knit. The pattern says to use the yarn held doubled (I used a worsted weight Paton's Wool in light blue I got from Michael's) but I only did that for the giant head. For the rest of the squid, I used a single strand of yarn.

Because I started this squid a few months back, it was easier to use the tentacle instructions as a guideline instead of following them exactly. And, when I realized the tentacles don't all have to be exactly the same length to still look really cool, finishing up this embellishment was quick and painless.

Here's the squid all knit up and looking like an alien autopsy...

And here it is, actually looking okay and semi-attached to the hat. I added grey yarn-stitched eyes and, in the same light blue yarn as the squid body, stitched down the head using a running stitch. To me, the head placement was the most important to figure out and then the legs could fly out all willy-nilly at their leisure.

This is what the inside view looks like. Nothing special and not particularly neat, but the squid is still secure on my hat.

 And here is my hat all finished! I'm excited to finally be done with this thing. The finished hat and the partially finished squid have just been hanging out in my knitting basket, waiting for the day I have a little motivation to get some unfinished projects done.

 I love how the tentacles turned out--I had a vague plan of how I wanted them to lie on the hat, but after few stitches into each tentacle, the yarn sort of dictates how it wants to be shaped.

Because I knit this hat so long ago, I had to add a button to the back to cinch it in! This hat fit when I had longer hair, but since I cut it all off into a pixie cut, the hat drowns my head! I put too much work into this hat not to wear it, so this was the easiest (and easily reversed) solution I came up with.

Happy making!