Look how awesome that is, right?! I made the design for the tongue and the eyes freehand--the eyes are basically rectangular shapes with a decrease in the middle, sewn in half and embroidered with some black. It's made with all Sugar 'n Cream cotton yarns in Black, Red, Yellow and Hot Green, if I remember all the color names correctly.
I started out trying to do an ombre sort of pattern--starting with more rows of yellow at the bottom of the hat, and interspacing them with the green until it was solid green at the top. I'm not sure if that worked out as good as it seemed in my head, and it looked plain afterwards, so I decided to use the base of the hat for a frog idea that was floating around in my head.
Then I washed it...
And I found out Sugar 'n Cream does not set their black dyes properly. I tried to take into account some fabric bleeding, and I washed my batch of hats separately. I even changed the water on the ones with black yarn about five times (it bled that much, but I thought it was done bleeding). But oh, no: this hat--and another hat with more black in it--got stacked together with some other hats when they were half dry. I thought everything would be ok. FAIL. Even after I washed the hats repeatedly, and even after they were half dry, the black still bled like a... well... something I shouldn't type here. My whole batch of four or five hats had black dye on it. It took a lot of chemicals, cleaning, bluing, soaking, and rewashing to get my hats clean again. Even now, the batch I washed and screwed up are a little pill-y from all the washing, and a bit more dull than my glorious before-washing pictures.
So yeah, that's why I haven't felt like knitting lately. I'm still getting over my rage, let me tell you, internets.
