We didn’t want the crocheters to be left out of the Hallowe’en Wreath fun and silliness, so here is our Cousin Itt inspired crochet monster wreath. Cousin Itt, as you may know, was a charismatic character in The Addams Family and had a similar hair issue, hence Cousin Itt’s Wreath.

Itt is simple, really. We know Cousin Itt didn’t have any visible eyes, but for Hallowe’en we just had to. One of us was thinking of all those scenes in Scooby Doo and other cartoons where pairs of eyes pop open in the darkness, the other one was thinking of more pompoms… One of us went and fetched some amazing pompom ‘art’ books from the Japanese bookstore, the other one sat down with pompom maker and scrap yarn… If you know how to make eyeball pompoms, then why wouldn’t you? (There are nice diagrams to show you how to make the eyeball pompoms with both pompom makers, circles of cardboard and rectangles of cardboard, but we do assume that you know the basic pompom method.)

Yarn: Katia ‘Maxi Merino’, 55% Merino Wool, 45% Acrylic 125m / 135yds / 100g ball, which we got from Deramores but any similar chunky would work.

3 x 100g balls. Actual amount used: just about all 3 balls, 365m / 405yds / 300g with a few metres left over for the black bits in the pompoms.

Wreath size: Our form is 33cm/13” in diameter

We bought our polystyrene wreath form from Craftmill, their service is excellent. With Cousin Itt’s Wreath you have to pull the crochet quite tightly around the form to give the ‘fur’ some body, and we did find that the white polystyrene ‘grins’ through, but this didn’t bother us enough to make us want to do anything about it - unless you’re really looking at it closely then the ‘fur’ covers it up. You could always cover or paint your form in an appropriate colour to alleviate this, although if you do use paint on polystyrene make sure it’s the right sort of paint or you’ll be in a terrible mess.

8mm hook OR the size required to give you the correct (ish) tension.

Tension: We’ve given widths per strip as crocheted as (really) you’re not going to do a separate tension square, now are you? Each strip should be approximately 14cm / 5” wide. A little wider wouldn’t matter, but you wouldn’t want your strips to be any narrower.

Your preferred needle / latch hook for darning ends in.

A tapestry needle for sewing the crochet around your form.