A Day Late: The Octopus’ Masquerade

Octopus are absolute masters of disguise. There’s straight-up camouflage, like so, which the octopus manages by controlling not only the color of its skin but the texture as well. There’s pretending to be a coconut.  And then there’s the mimic octopus, which easily apes more formidable ocean creatures in its quest to protect its soft body: it slips from sea snake to flounder to lionfish with effortless grace.

 

 

Octopus, in other words, would LOVE Halloween.

 

 

Yes, I know, it’s November first and the season of bats and pumpkins and spooks and masks has fallen behind us, but as far as I’m concerned masquerades are always in season.  We poor bipeds may struggle to manage a single mask, as we need keep hands free for drinks and vittles, but this ambitious little critter has no such limitations and subscribes to a philosophy of “the more, the merrier.”   At least, when it comes to disguises.

 

Apologies for putting this one up the day AFTER Halloween- I was all set to throw it up yesterday, but couldn’t find my micron pens.  Still can’t find them, in fact; I moved months ago and still haven’t quite figured out where all my stuff ended up.  It is maddening, in a vague sort of way.  Still, it gave me an excuse to explore a local art store or two, and that’s a good thing!  I’ll get to know this “Denver” beastie yet.

 

I know it’s been a while, but you remember how it goes, right?

 

Click on the picture, and you’ll get the full-res.  I release these free bits of line art under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

You are allowed and indeed encouraged to do whatever you want with the piece(s) (use, reuse, abuse, remix, share, and of course, embroider), just follow these two simple rules:

1) Give me credit (a link back is always appreciated- that way, everyone else knows they can use it too)
2) Don’t make a profit off any use or modification of my work.

To be fair, I won’t sue you or anything if you don’t give me credit- I’ll just feel all hurt, and no one wants that.  Also to be fair, should youreally want to use them in a profit-making venture (ie: stitch it on something you then sell in your etsy store, use it as a print for your own fabric line, etc.), talk to me and maybe we can work something out so everybody wins.  Should you want to say thanks, leave a comment and/or tell a friend or six.  Finally, if you do make something, embroidery or not, let me know and I’ll happily blog it!

You can find a reminder/introduction to embroidery, including basic stitches and a by-no-means exhaustive list of methods of transferring patterns to fabric in this post (there’s also a good round-up here and another one here).  Finally: if you’ve got suggestions for embroidery patterns you’d like to see, I would love to hear them (no promises, though).  You can find the rest of my patterns under the Embroidery Patterns category.