From Egg Hats to Straw Hat: Crocheting Monkey D. Luffy

In which a joke about breakfast turns into a pirate

Every project I finish seems to start somewhere completely unrelated to where it ends. This one started in the fridge.

I made a tiny orange beanie. For an egg. There was no plan beyond "I wonder if I can make something that small", and once it existed, the obvious thing to do was put it on an egg, draw a face on it, and leave it in the egg tray for someone to find.

My wife laughed, which was a mistake

Because that is all the encouragement I need.

If one egg gets a hat, the rest of the carton is being treated unfairly. So I started a second one, and somewhere between casting on and the first increase round the yellow yarn in my hand stopped being just yellow yarn. Yellow crown, red band, wide brim. There is exactly one hat that looks like that, and every One Piece fan on the planet can name it from across a room.

The straw hat for an egg came out better than the beanie. The brim was the interesting part: it has to flare out flat without curling, which means a lot of increases in a lot of the right places, and a certain willingness to rip it back when it turns into a bowl instead of a hat.

Nube tries it on

Our cat, Nube, has never consented to anything in her life, but she does hold still when she is comfortable, which is close enough.

She wore it for about four seconds. That was enough. Looking at a very unimpressed white cat in a straw hat, the next step stopped being an idea and became simply a thing I had not done yet: if the hat is that recognisable at that size, the rest of Luffy should exist under it.

My eldest son loves One Piece. The project had chosen its recipient before I had picked up the hook.

No pattern, just a lot of looking

I did not follow a pattern. I did spend an embarrassing number of evenings looking at other people's, though.

There are dozens of Luffy amigurumi out there and many of them are lovely, but none of them was the one in my head. Some were too chibi, some too realistic, most were a good bit bigger than the hat I had already made. And that was the actual constraint: the hat existed first, so everything else had to be built to fit a hat I was not going to remake.

So the "pattern" was really a slow accumulation of stolen ideas. How that person handles the hair. How this one attaches the arms. What a face looks like when the eyes are that big relative to the head. Then a lot of counting, a lot of frogging, and a body sized by holding it up against the hat every few rounds.

Building him in pieces

He came together stage by stage, and each stage looked wrong until the next one fixed it.

The bare body was the least promising object I have ever made: a bald, blank thing with enormous eyes, more haunted doll than pirate captain. Then the hair went on, strand by strand in black yarn, and the whole thing turned a corner in about twenty minutes. Hair is doing an absurd amount of work here.

The red vest came next, worked separately and open at the front so the chest and the scar show through. At that point he was recognisable but oddly plain, and I nearly stopped there.

Good thing I did not. The last details are the ones that sold it: the yellow sash at the waist, and the sandals, with their straps embroidered on in dark thread. Tiny, fiddly, five minutes of work each, and somehow they are the difference between "a crochet doll with a straw hat" and "Luffy".

He lives in my son's room now

My son loved him. That is the whole payoff and it is worth every ripped-back round: he took him, turned him over, found the scar under the eye and the straps on the sandals, and then put him somewhere visible. Luffy is in his room now, on a shelf, which is the highest honour available in this house.

Twenty centimetres of pirate, descended in a straight line from a joke about an egg.

Has one of your silly little projects ever escalated into something you actually care about? I would love to hear where yours ended up.

Cheers,

Horacio Gonzalez - LostInBrittany