Ikey's Narwhal Hat

When my good friend, Emma, saw Kieran's shark hat (and read about me worrying that the fin would look too much like a horn or tusk), she had a brainstorm: what if we used the shark hat pattern and modified it to make a narwhal hat for her son, Ike?  A bit of hooking resulted in this hilarious hat (modeled on Sonia, of course):

Ikey, who is one of Sonia's best friends in the whole entire world, is seriously obsessed with narwhals.  Emma sent me this picture of Ikey posing in his hat.  He seemed to really love it when I gave it to him on Tuesday morning!

I had never even heard of a narwhal until after Sonia was born and I saw it in her Raffi's Baby Beluga book!  For the uninitiated, you can read about narwhals here, and here is a good picture that I found (FYI, the middle narwhal is a rare two-tusked type):

I lined the hat with black fleece to keep Ikey's head warm during the late part of this never-ending winter.  Emma and I debated about whether or not to include the teeth on the narwhal hat....  I did some research, and narwhals only have two teeth!  The narwhal's tusk is one of these teeth (an elongated upper left canine, to be precise), and the other tooth is buried in its jaw and not used for feeding.  The buried tooth must be some sort of holdover from an earlier evolution of the narwhal.  But what fun would that hat be without the teeth?  So we decided that the teeth needed to be added for maximum fun and enjoyment.  Another interesting fact: only male narwhals have a tusk; females' 2 teeth stay safely buried inside.

The tusk placement presented something of a problem....  Since it is a tooth, the tusk protrudes just above the mouth on a real narwhal.  But, on the narwhal hat, when I put the tusk where it really should go (between and just below the eyes), it looked like a nose.  So, I sewed it on a bit higher-- still pointing forward, but not in danger of looking like the carrot nose on a snowman.  The narwhal is sometimes called the "unicorn of the sea", but I didn't want the tusk to be so high that the hat turned into a ferocious unicorn!  Speaking of which, how hilarious is this picture that someone created?

Well, happy narwhaling, Ike-a-buddy!  You are a very fun kid to crochet for.