My little minions

These hats are so adorable I can’t stand it.  If you haven’t seen the movie Despicable Me, please do so!

The hat part is dead easy. The eyeball is where things are a bit more challenging.  I whipped out a crochet hook and tried to crochet it, since the pattern photo clearly shows crocheted eyes.  I figured crochet was chosen because it’s easier to make concentric circles with crochet than with knitting.  But my crochet is a bit rudimentary, and I got something ruffley:

Then I noticed that the pattern ALSO had instructions for knitted eyeballs (but with a disclaimer that the designer prefers the look of crocheted eyes).  She specifies using dpns and for some reason I did.  Man, it took me FOREVER to knit this: 

The pattern calls for you to bind off after completing the white portion.  Then you make a gray i-cord and sew it around the eye.  I thought it sounded a lot simpler to finish the eye with an applied i-cord bindoff, so I did.  And I liked the bindoff.  But look at how the black part of the eyeball isn’t round at all!  Yuck!  The pattern called for you to change yarns on an increase round and to use the “knit through front and back,” which created this pixellated look.  So I tried again, and got these:Much improved.  I made them bigger, too, as you can see.  Then I hit them with steam from the iron to see if they would settle down a bit.  I didn’t actually touch the iron to the fabric, since the i-cord is very three-dimensional and I wanted to keep that (the gray is supposed to look like goggles).  Can you see the difference?  Left eye is unblocked, right eye is steamed: Then I sewed the eyeballs onto the hats.  I used a black tail from the middle to tack down that middle section, and then I used a long piece of gray yarn to whip stitch around the circumference.  I picked up one side of the gray V closest to the white part, which is kind of on the back of the eye, so it doesn’t show:

Mama and minions are very pleased!