Sesame Street beanies

"Sunny days sweepin' the ... clouds away... on my way... to where the air is clear!!"   Yes, I am a product of the 70's and a first generation Sesame streeter.  While I'm not always thrilled with the content these days on Sesame Street, I must confess, I still adore the little monster puppets.   I grew up hearing Cookie Monster's poor grammar and his even poorer dietary habits, and yet, I grew up just fine, sorta.  Anyway, one day I got a random inkling to make beanie hats that resembled some Sesame Street characters.

I started out crocheting a basic baby beanie using this pattern: Girl in the Air blog: Beanies  , but added a band of black at the end to resemble a mouth.  The first round is simply sc stitches, but on the the second pass of the band, I used a progression of sc, hdc, dc, stitches then reversed the pattern in order to make the mouth appear as though it were open. I ended with another round of sc stitches.

For the eyes I made (2) two-toned pompoms.  There are many techniques to making pompoms, however, my method was wrapping a square piece of cardboard about 3 inches wide with white yarn. Then I added black  yarn so it was half and half.  The more revolutions of yarn, the denser the pompom. I pulled the wad of yarn off the cardboard, carefully cinching the loops with my hand until I could tie a segment of yarn around the middle. With a my fabric scissors I cut the loops then shaped the black yarn down until it resembled an eye ball set against the white yarn.  I trimmed up the white yarn and attached the eyes to the beanie using thread and a needle.  Through trial and error, I found the eyes looked best down low to the brim, just resting above the "mouth".  Cookie Monsters eyes needed to have that crazed look, so one is slightly higher than the other.  One pupil is slightly smaller as well.  Elmo's nose is a simple single colored pompom.

I have others that I am making, but have gotten side tracked with other projects.  If you are a friend of mine on facebook, you might have seen my Zoe version in a photo shoot by my friend Jen Jensen of PS139Photography 

So this blog post was brought to you today by the colors blue and red and by the number 2.  Have a great day!