Noooooooo....

This: 

led to THIS:

... :(

Double-Knit (Surprise!) Hat

I guess it was a natural progression that I moved on to a more complicated pattern for double-knitting, although I'm feeling fairly knit-out by the end of this. I made the hat following the pattern here with a chart I put together featuring those delightful invaders from space, the Space Invaders. Their pixely goodness lent itself perfectly to a knitting chart and while I would normally get bored pretty quickly on a bigger project (yeah, for me a hat IS a bigger project, especially if I actually finish it!) the emerging pattern plus the added challenge of the second colour layer made it fun.

I do feel like it needs some kind of pompom on top but you kinda can't without also having some kind of pompom on the inside too. So, dilemma.

Totoro Double-Knit Potholder

So, apparently I've become fairly obsessed with double knitting. If you don't know what that it it's when you cast on two pieces at the same time, onto the same needle, and knit them both one stitch at a time. If you cross the colours over (creating a reversed two-colour pattern on each side) the two pieces are connected, but you can also knit two separate items, if you're careful and don't twist your yarn anyway.

My second potholder features the Studio Ghibli forest troll Totoro and his two smaller totoro friends in blue and pale brown. And it's adorable - at least on the blue-totoro side. The brown totoro on the blue background... well... it reminds me more of the freaky rabbit-guy Frank from Donnie Darko.
Perfect end result or not it was fun, and who's to say Totoro doesn't have a dark side, anyway? I bet if anyone did anything to Mei or Satsuki (the little girls from the film) he'd get pretty fired up about it.

... still creeps me out, though.

EDIT (for Sarah!)- and for anyone who would like to make their own, here is the chart I worked from. Enjoy!

Double-Knit Potholder

If you've even a small cynical streak and a slight interest in the world of video gaming the Zero Punctuation videos by Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw are a must. They're plain old funny, plus spoken at breakneck pace, with an accent, and without pauses for breathing. It's almost exhausting just to listen to them.
Part of the appeal is also the animation, which frequently features this little guy: the Zero Punctuation demon. If he has a name I don't know it, but what I do know is that he's a cutie. So cute that when I saw Off the Hook Astronomy's double-knit potholder chart - which you can find at http://offthehookastronomy.blogspot.com/2010/09/buffyzero-punctuation-pot-holders.html - I couldn't resist.
I'd been wanting to try double knitting for a while and found it to be not only fairly straightforward but also fun. This quick knit only takes a few hours, and once you get going the picture emerges quickly enough to keep it interesting. I know myself and I know that I get bored easily on large projects, so these are great. I'm already working on the next one!

Double knitting, by the way, is easier than it looks. So long as you can keep your stitches in order, and keep track of when to change colours, you can do it. The facing panel is always knit and the back panel is always purl - so as you go along the needle you knit one, purl one, and repeat. Any pixel-y image in two colours will work, and if you can't find a suitably-sized sprite/chart on the web there are a bunch of sites and freeware applications that can transform an image into a chart for you.