WIP: Cthulhu Mask

Have you ever knit or crocheted something with the power to actually scare you?

I think this may have been featured in an episode of the X-Files once; the melty wool face episode that gave you nightmares for 6 months and burned the image of the hideous creature into your retinas. It doesn’t much help when the camera pans out, either.

It is perhaps the visual connotations and memories of growing up in the time of the IRA bombings in London, one of which went off a few minutes’ walk away that make balaclavas and ski masks visually unappealing, or it may be just that they look like a hollowed out face, I’m not sure. But this isn’t the finished item, by any means. No, what this piece needs is adornments.

This is the mask with one of two sets of tentacles resting, as yet unattached, on the front of the ski mask. It’s in representation of one of H P Lovecraft’s creations, the Cthulhu, a green, tentacle-faced monster. I’ve been asked to make this by a friend, and it looked like an interesting project and something a bit different from my recent sock knitting. It’s coming together pretty quickly – I all but finished the actual mask part in an evening and have been crocheting the tentacles in front of episodes of The X-Files, just to make it even more unnerving. Hugh The Manatee keeps coming to my rescue, though, always on hand to slay the scary beast.