The dead fish hat

Oh no!  Brett's been attacked by a fish!!

Giving my best Popeye impression.

Check out my tail!

Ok, here I just look plain mischievous!

And here?  Fat.

So two of my three nieces were excited by the idea of me knitting them the Dead Fish Hat pattern for Christmas this year.  When they were visiting this summer, Sarah (the middle niece) was in charge of picking out the colors for her hat and for Grace's (the youngest niece, who was staying at her grandmother's at the time).  Brett suggested, if I'm going to make these hats as gifts for the girls, I better do a test run.

Right, a test run.  Because I love knitting something with no real purpose.

Wellll...ok, maybe I've shown that that's exactly how I sometimes knit (there are octopuses and voodoo dolls and...)

Anyhow...he made a good point, AND it would give me a chance to play around with some color-changing yarn I had that Sarah hadn't actually picked out for the two hats I'm to knit as gifts - so, sure, what the hell.  And who knows, one of US might want to wear a dead fish on our head this winter.  I'm not normally a hat guy - it messes up my beautiful tresses (more like frizzes them out), but there are days out in the snow (like with the snow blower, or playing with the dogs in the backyard) where I actually do need a hat.  It's not like my hair is as thick as it used to be....

Back to the hat. 

Good thing I knit this test one up.  I learned some stuff, got a good feel for the weird parts of the pattern, etc.  I definitely had it made clear to me that I can't purl flat very well - it's too loose, and this is obvious on the slouchy-shaped mouth parts of the fish.  Oh well - it's a test hat, and I'll be way more careful about knitting super snuggly when doing up the gift hats.

Anyhow - whaddaya think of my dead fish?