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Time to Knit Some Spooky Socks

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Pumpkins and jack o’lanterns are my preferred crafty motifs of the Halloween season, but there are lots of other cute projects our there if you want to bring a little spookiness to your knitting projects.

The Happy Haunts Socks from Valorie Wibbens offer a great way to add a Halloween motif to a basic sock pattern.

The pattern itself is more of a recipe with the chart for the ghosts included. If you have a favorite plain sock pattern you can adapt it to use this chart. She uses a toe up design (with cute stripes on the toe if you’re into that) but you could do it top-down as well if you like.

You can grab the free pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Valorie Wibbens.]

Looking for more knitting patterns for socks? Check these out on Etsy. And these Knitting Pattern books on Amazon.

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Knit a Hat with a Flock of Chickens

It’s well known (among knitters, anyway) that knitters seem to love chickens as a motif and a subject of our knitting projects. The Emotional Support Chicken and all the other chicken knitting patterns are just the beginning of our devotion to farmyard friends. 

For example, there’s Farmer Dennis’ Chicken Hat. This free pattern from Stacy Black is a simple worsted weight beanie sized for adults and decorate with a couple of little rounds of colorwork fences and a flock of chickens strutting around the body of the hat. 

You don’t need a lot of any of the colors for the chickens, their facial features or the fences, so this is a great project for using little leftover bits from other projects. The main color for the body of the hat is less than a skein using the yarn suggested, so you might just have everything you need in your house to start stitching up this hat right away. 

The colorwork is presented as a chart, with a 16 stitch section that repeats around the body of the hat. All the color changes are shown on the chart but I think it would be easier to knit the whole chicken in the chicken color and add the eye, beak and other features using duplicate stitch when the knitting is done. That way you don’t have to carry those yarns around the whole hat for just a few stitches. 

As the name suggests, the original hat was given to a farmer who shared their eggs, but anyone who raises chickens or just has a thing for the fowl is sure to love this cute hat. It wouldn’t be too difficult for someone new to stranded knitting or reading charts to make, either, so if that’s you, give it a try. 

The pattern is available for free on Ravelry. 

[Photo: Stacy Black]

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