Saturday, March 01, 2008

Into Your Arms, Into Your Arms I Can Go

P1060097

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.

Octopus in Progress

8 comments:

Jessica said...

That is so cute. I love your color choices.

Anonymous said...

Does realistic knitted octopus = no googly eyes? Sheesh. Can it play the drums, at least?

LizKnits said...

I absolutely love this pattern and think your color choices are just fabulous ... they really pop!

Cactusneedles said...

That came out great! Too cool! I love it!

Laura said...

I love it! So cute!

Anonymous said...

That's a fantastic octopus!

Nederlass said...

Very cool! Love the colors too. (And awesome post title! ;)

Lola and Ava said...

Don't you just love him? The baby shower that I made my octopus for got canceled. So he's looking at me right now! I'm keeping him & I'm not going to feel bad about it.
L