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.

(Finally) finished Cthulhu mittens

The Cthulhu mittens have been languishing in the sewing up phase for far too long now- I'd finished the first one, finished the second one, decided the first one needed the seams redoing, and got half way through taking it apart, but hadn't got around to putting it back together.
I decided they'd make a good birthday present for my little brother, which added a little more urgency to matters, and they finally got done today. A little late, but hey. So here they are in all their runic glory.
I didn't get around to duplicate stitching the red highlights I was thinking of adding, which is a bit of a shame. I'm not sure if they'd've worked, but I would have liked to try it and see.

I think the seams on the two mittens don't quite match up, the top of the right one seems slightly rounder to me. I think that might be because I started sewing at the top on that one and on the bottom on the other. Hopefully that doesn't show too much. I'm also a little concerned that with the seams placed as they are the mittens don't quite lie flat when you take them off, the seams aren't quite at the sides.

Still, I'm very happy with them- hope little brother is too!
Hugh.

Super-bonus lion

So, here we have one more lion. It's just the same as the earlier ones, except the brown yarn is a little darker.
When the earlier lions were visiting church a while back, a teacher friend asked if it might be possible to get one of them to use in her school, she thought the children would be very keen on them. Since the children are way too young to deal with sexuality issues, it wouldn't be able to be explicitly gay, which I thought would be a bit of a shame since that was a lot of the point of them. It'd also mean breaking up the pride.
But still, this seemed like a fantastic thing to be able to contribute to, so I decided the best thing to do would be to make an extra lion for her. This one isn't gay, or at least it doesn't have any particular orientation- he's just a fun rainbow-coloured lion. He's also probably going to be named Parsley(after the very friendly lion from "the herbs").

In other lion news, the lion and the lamb are happily settled with their new owners, and they're named Leo and Larry respectively.
I'm still on the look out for things to do with the gay pride lions too...

Hugh.

Sitty knitty(II)

More cows!
Here's the second, sitting, cow. The body is the same as the first one, the legs are the only major change. It took several attempts and a suprising amount of cow-research to come up with a leg shape I was happy with. Apparently when cows sit, they fold they took their hooves up underneath them, rather like cats do. I found it was very hard to come up with a geometrically accurate way to make this shape, so in the end I settled for making the foot part nice and thin and folding it. It's not a very elegant solution, but I didn't want to overcomplicate a tiny detail unnecessarily.

So there they are! What do you think, do they look cow-like? I'm not entirely sure. I've had suggestions of mouse, pig and hippo.
Also, the sitting cow has smaller horns than the standing one. This is because she's going to be turned into a female cow at some point, so they can be a little cow-couple. Since this phase of the project was aimed towards writing a pattern, that'll be a project for the future though.

Hugh.

Sitty knitty(I)

Here we have the completed lion and lamb! I'm not sure how well either one does by itself, but they make a nice pair. Being so different kinda draws attention away from some of the imperfections.
The lamb's fleece is done in fur- or loop-stitch. I think it could have done with being a bit thicker, and the yarn doesn't bend well so they stand up a lot. Interestingly, because the surface is curved outwards the loops end up more spaced than they would normally be, so some modifying of the fur-stitch pattern may be in order.
His eyes look a bit crazy, particularly from head on, because the pupils point sideways. That's kinda deliberate, sheep's eyes point sideways naturally, but I think it would have been better to space the eyes a bit wider too. The lamb has little ears too, which I really like. They don't show up so well in this picture. Should probably take more pictures.

So yay, they're done, they're cute, and they're sitting down* :o)
More sitting down* animals to follow in the near future!
Hugh.

* - Terry Wogan points out(at some length) that "sitting" is the action, like "taking a seat", strictly speaking they are *sat* down.

Nativity cow

There's a cool story behind this one - one of my City Knitty friends has a church-friend who has been knitting a nativity scene for years and years. Apparently when she became Christian, she resolved to knit a nativity scene, and she's been working away at it ever since, making a figure each year. The one figure she needs to complete the set is the cow, but she's never been able to find a pattern for one, and she's getting older now, and knitting is getter harder for her. So having found I like to design stuffed animals, said friend asked me if I could write a pattern for her to knit.

So here we go, my first attempt at a cow. The yarn is a bit lighter than would be ideal, but this was just the only brown yarn I had to hand, and since it's just a test piece I wasn't too concerned with the colour. I am assured however that there are cows that come in this colour.
The body and head are all worked in one piece, which folds up to make the complete shape. The legs are added seperately and have little pieces of wire to hold them up. It's a fun way to make shapes, and could be taken to more extreme versions, you could potentially make the entire thing, including legs, ears, tail and horns in one piece if you were that way inclined.
The big thing is that apparently nativity cows tend to be lying down. So for the second attempt, I'll try to find some way of rearranging the legs into a sitting position. I'm not quite sure how to do this, particularly the folded knee joints will be a bit tricky. Then since the second cow is really only being made to test the legs, I'll add some modifications to make it into a female cow, and the two test versions will go together as a nice cow-couple.

And yes, I realise that strictly speaking "cow" means female and this is a bull. I prefer to use "cow" as a general term, kinda like "man" and "mankind" isn't always gender-specific.