A very spoooooky Halloween

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Guess what spooooky project I've been keeping under my hat?

Well okay, not under my hat. It is my hat! And surely a spooky bit of knitting will help strike the fear of Halloween into you!

There are creepy black bats, flying across an orange background...

Skeletons with ghoulish red eyeballs...

Gross green worms inching along on a purple background...

And, well, I think those are supposed to be spiders down towards the bottom.

What a fun knit this was! I actually finished up this beret back in early September and have been waiting until Halloween to share it.

I bought all the yarn to knit this last Halloween (KnitPicks Palette, a nice and inexpensive yarn for colorwork), then suddenly it was past October 31st and I didn't feel like it any longer. Fast forward to this September. I was going to take it as my knitting project for our trip to New Mexico, except I started on the ribbing and accidentally had 3/4 of it finished before the trip. It was just too fun to put down!

It's a free pattern from Knitty called Scare Isle, on Ravelry here. I admit, I'm a sucker for seasonal knits in fall and winter, so how could I resist a Halloween beret?

(By the way, I was considering doing a tutorial for this hairstyle... it's a great way to fake a good hair day when you're having a crappy hair day. And all you need is a hairpins, hairspray, a hat and a sock. Hee!)



Hats are a great place to start if you're new to colorwork. You work them in the round so there's no purling with the back of the pattern facing you, and they go pretty quickly. Soon you'll have an awesome hat to be proud of! I like to work hats on two circular needles, so that I can keep the work relatively flat as I knit instead of it being all bunched up on DPNs or a 16" circular needle. I find it more tedious to manipulate the knitting using either of those methods. If you're new to colorwork, you may find it more difficult to keep your gauge loose enough when the work is all scrunched up, as it's hard to spread out your stitches so your floats aren't too tight. That's much easier to do when working on two circular needles. (Cat Bordhi has a good video on how to work on two circulars here.)

It's not a vintage pattern obviously, but you know how obsessed they were with novelty knits, so I think this would have been right at home in the 40s!

Have any fun Halloween plans today? We'll be staying in tonight, eating homemade chicken noodle soup and pie, and watching scary movies. No costumes for us this year, although I'm wearing an orange cardigan and my beret at work. But Pia got dressed up! I'm sure you can guess her wearing the hat lasted about as long as it took to take the photo. ;)

Hope you're having a spooktacular Halloween!