Monday, March 19, 2007

Snail torus



So, I was talking about knitting a torus animal for a friend, and we decided a snail would be nice. The plan is that the shell will be made up of three tori which will slot into each other(kind of like russian dolls), and an extra piece for the snail body.
The three tori will be blue, green and purple, these being favourite colours of said friend, and the body will probably be black, but we'll have to see how well this goes with the shell colours.
Being different sizes, I need to recalculate my original torus pattern to make the shell, and I'll need to add an extra couple of rows in the middle to give a nice flat middle to the tori which will help them hold each other in place better.
I'll knit the body as a tube and use short rows to make it curve. The hard part will be making sure that it'll be able to stand up - to make this work I might need to add some pouches with weights on the bottom, rather than spending too long trying to work out where it's centre of mass will be. This should make it a lot more stable in the sideways direction too.

And yay, graphics! I found a friendly bitmap editor to draw this in - it's not ideal, but I'm sure it makes more sense than my attempts to describe this in words :o).

Hugh.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

weights sound like an interesting idea...or you could bean bag it...i was thinking wouldn't you have to line something if you were planning on putting bean bag filling...if the knit is too loose it'll all just fall out!

the snail looks like it'll work in theory, but in practice i'm not certain yet...maybe you could put flippers on it and make it Lapras-esque + shell! something along the Dratini-cuteness factor would also be very cool.

Jhadur said...

Hmm, if it was a bean bag, it'd still have the same centre of gravity problem though?
The head will make the centre of mass quite far forwards, and since the base curves that way, it'll probably tend to tip. And since it's all quite narrow and the centre of mass is high up, I expect it to be quite unstable sideways.
The idea with the weights would be to distribute the weight around the bottom a bit to make the whole thing more stable.
It'd just take a couple of well placed pouches on the bottom which you can put 2p's into, and the cool thing would be that you can adjust them very easily, or take them out entirely if there's little folk involved and small pieces are a problem.
No?

Yi Knits said...

Hmm, coins might work quite well in fact, and i like it in projects when you can do nifty stuff :) innovation is what it is! unless you happen to have some lead weights lying around which is highly unlikely, but you don't really want something that's going to make it too cumbersome...maybe marbles?

:)

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