Into Your Arms, Into Your Arms I Can Go

Oooh, I really like this Octopus--I can't believe that I didn't find the pattern sooner. It's a quick knit, started yesterday evening, finished early this afternoon. And, I should add, I spent a good part of the morning buying baseball tickets, running 2.74 miles, and scoring my first ever order of Wollmeise (two hanks of lace yarn in Market Spice and Mitternacht, but I'll probably only keep one). Plus, as you can see below, I stopped several times to take photos, because I really like the colors and how weird the individual parts look.

The construction is interesting and the instructions are very thorough. Joining all of the pieces together is a little tricky (there some "invisible grafting" that you can see if you look closely above), but at the end I had only ONE end to weave in. Considering that the legs have a total of 32 yarn ends, I think that's pretty awesome. I also like that it's about as realistic as a knitted octopus is going to be--it's not cartoonish, and the legs are naturally asymmetrical.

I used about 11 grams of the green and 17 grams of the purple, but I tossed out a lot of trimmed ends (mostly green bits from the many long-tail cast-ons) amounting to probably a couple of grams. I'm looking forward to making another one soon--maybe I'll try reversing the colors, or digging out some remnants of Cascade that I have lying around. This one is likely to end up with a young child, so I didn't use pipe cleaners to make the legs poseable--that's another option I'd like to try.