The completed snail torus

So, the snail torus is complete! I was a bit unsure about it at first, it looks kinda sloppy to me - the purple torus should probably have been knit tighter, probably stuffed more, and I don't think the shell quite sits straight on to body. But I've been getting some really good reactions to it, so I guess I'm being overly critical.

So, knitting - the three tori are knitted as flat pieces, then one seam is grafted together to make a tube, and the ends of the tube are sewn together. You could do them on circular needles and get rid of this seam too, but I think it's easier this way. I tried to arrange the radii so that the outer radius of each torus is a little bigger than the inner radius of the next one - turns out that isn't necessary at all, the stuffing makes them bulge plenty to hold them in place, and this offset makes them a bit too tight.


The body is knit as a tube, starting from the tail, with short rows to make it curl round. It has a couple of purl stitches each round to make little gutters, and force the tube to be slightly flatter than it would otherwise be - turns out an oval tube is geometrically the same as a round tube, so you can't get this effect just by shaping. They're a little uneven, owing to where the ends of the needles came - will have to bear this in mind when I do texturey things on dpns in future.
There's also a slight issue that I had to hastily improvise a grafted seam for the mouth, otherwise my tube wouldn't have left any openings for me to use to stuff it. I like how that turned out though, it gives it an odd expression which reminds me of the muppets when they do their 'shocked' look.

But yay, it's done, it's cute, and people seem to really like it :o)
Hugh.

Now, aren't you glad I got through all of that without a "nine inch snails" pun?