Knitted Animal Hats

Goodness, it has been a busy couple of weeks at our house!  We have recently adopted a lovable one and a half year old dog named Fritz and his cuteness as been quite distracting.

 Consequently, I have fallen way behind on my blogging.  I am still working on some tutorials for jazzing up and personalizing your knitted items, but in the meantime I thought I would share with you some animal hats I have been working on.

Inspiration for my designs often come from the children in my life and these hats are perfect example of that.  The Animal Hat Project began with the idea to make a monkey hat for a special little girl I know that recently celebrated her first birthday.  These animal hats are sock monkey inspired because the mother of the one year old that the monkey was made for told me a long time ago that she really liked the new-school sock monkey hats that she has seen lately, using  different colors besides the traditional sock monkey grey marl and red.

When my own children saw what I was making they asked if I could make them one too, but they wanted different animals.  This gave me the idea to use this as an opportunity to start working on a customizable animal hat pattern.  My plan is to write a pattern with many creative options.  The pattern will have six different animal options.  So far I have completed the first three animals.  Along with the monkey, rabbit, and bear,  I plan to have options in the pattern for an owl, tiger, and pig too.

This has been a really fun project to work on simply because I have let my creativity run wild.  I wanted these hats to be just as playful as the children who wear them, so I designed them to be bright and colorful.  The samples that I have completed so far have been made with little girls in mind, but my next sample will be the tiger and will show some boy options that will be included in the pattern.  

However, before I continue with writing this pattern I need to get focused and catch up on some of my homework for The CYC instructor program and TKGA master hand knitting program.   I only have a few swatches and assignments done, much less than I had hoped to get done by now.  As always, there is too much to do and never enough time to do it!