So the hat that I promised P ages ago, the one he really really wanted me to make, was based on a video game. You may have heard of the Metroid series of games – basically there are creatures called metroids that look like this:

They’re greenish, have 3 red ‘eyes’, and claws that will latch onto you and suck your energy. P wanted me to make him a toque (‘hat’ or ‘beanie’ for my non-Canadian friends) that looked like a metroid. As you saw before, we bought yarn together in appropriate colours. Cascade 220 comes in a great selection of colours, including a heathered collection, which I find just gives a bit more life to the colours.

(the greens are heathered, the red and white are regular)

Then I made a very technical sketch:

And then, I started designing my very first hat! I knew going into this that the hat part would be easy – it was the claws that would be the hard part.

Nothing comes up on Ravelry when you search for ‘metroid’. Searching for metroid hat comes up with a lot of pictures of fleece ones, and some crochet ones – crocheting the claws would be much easier, but I’m a knitter through-and-through. I also wanted to make the claws functional as earflaps – it gets really cold here, and I didn’t want to make P a hat that didn’t actually keep him warm! That’s why we bought wool to make it out of.

The big question is: Do I know enough about knitting to make the fabric match my sketch?