Knitting week

Hi people!
Last week (13-20/10) was national knitting week, and to celebrate the folks at City Knitty decided to do some knitting for charity. After some discussion we decided to knit for the premature babies wing at our local maternity hospital. After discussing this with them, they told us what they'd really like would be some knitted toys - apparently they like to give presents to the little babies who're there over christmas.

Happily I just happened to have a toy-making project on hold which seemed perfect for the occasion. The idea was to make a collection of safari animals in the style of the lions, but using stranded knitting to give them patterns. I decided the best animals for this would be a tiger, a giraffe and a zebra. Unfortunately, in order to be baby-safe I won't be able to reinforce the giraffe and zebra legs, so there's no way they'll be able to stand up, but I figure they could always be suspended as some kind of mobile.
But I'm looking forward to seeing how they turn out. I get the impression texture plays a really big part in how people identify animals so I'm curious how easily recognisable they'll be.

Hugh :o).

Kitty knitty

Hi people!
I've been thinking of new things to do with shadow knitting. One way I'm interested in is mixing colourwork with shadow knitting to overlay patterns(Bob is doing some similar experiments).
So I was fascinated when I saw these Chesire cat socks - if you remember Alice in Wonderland, when the Cheshire cat disappears, it's grin stays behind:

`All right,' said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly,
beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin,
which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

`Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice;
`but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever
saw in my life!'

So I'd like to portray this using shadow knitting. I'll make a cat design in shadow knitting, then I'll add the mouth with coloured yarn. Because the grin will be worked across the stripes, it will be visible from all angles, whereas the cat will be made up of raised and lowered stripes it'll only show up from some. The cat design will need to be very simple, shadow knitting isn't well suited to intricate detail, so it'll just be a very simple cartoony cat's face.
And I'll make this into a scarf. I haven't made a scarf for ages! I'll need to see what nice scarf yarn I can find which would suit this.

Hugh.