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?

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.