More Fluff and Stuff

Everyone is having babies lately (everyone but me), and that includes my fellow grad students. One of my buds, bless her heart, will be 9 months pregnant when she defends her prospectus. 9 months. No thank you.
Her baby shower was this week, and it was a rather gender neutral one, as the wee one has refused to uncross its legs for the last 3 ultrasounds.

So I asked her what kind of animal she wanted and she said they were decorating with a sort of "cow theme." Cool. New stuffed animal.

I flipped through the cow patterns on Ravelry and finally settled on Milkshake the cow. It seemed cute enough. The one I really wanted to make was this one, but it's in some book that I cannot access... The udder is freaking hilarious. Oh well. Milkshake was a quick knit--the pieces are made flat and sewn up when it's stuffed. This was the first error free stuffed animal pattern I've encountered in a while, so kudos to the designer.

It's not without quirks though :)

 For starters, in the original pattern, the head is attached to the body using the base of the nose... I... I can't do that... I just can't. Heads connect to bodies with necks... noses, well, they're independent of the head-neck system. You can't just go around connect noses to torsos like it happens every day (yes, yes I know it's a stuffed animal and you totally can. By you I meant me.)

 Thing #2 is that body--those are stripes. Cows have spots. It totally works out okay in the end but when I first held the head an body together, all I could think was "Oh no... It's a Zebra."

 On the plus side, I now have a pattern for a zebra. (Ear up higher, no horns, nostrils a bit lower. All very small changes, really).

Overall, I recommend this guy pretty highly. It's a cute little pattern.

We celebrated my belated birthday this weekend with my folks. Everyone had requests for knitted goods, and I got enough yarn for a sweater for the husband (win), so I'll be cranking out gifts here for the next couple of weeks if I'm being efficient. I've got requests for a teal Les Miserables for my mother, I cranked out a hat for my little brother (no pictures, unfortunately--it only took a few hours, so he left with while it was still drying.), and a Caroline for my seester. I also am pining away for a kit that knitpicks has had for a while, but I think I've got enough knitting on my plate to last me for the next couple of eons, so I'll hold off on that for a while. Knitting for others is more fun anyhow. I don't have to figure out how to store finished objects.

Fluff and Stuff

A baby has been born to my dear friends on the other side of the continent and since I can't go see this new wee one (who the internet assures me is most adorable), I must make things for it.

I get to make stuffed animals (!)

The more little plush things I make, the more I enjoy it. There's a lot of freedom in a stuffed animal pattern--certainly there are a certain number of pieces in a certain shape, but they need to be assembled. That's when you get to make choices. Will it look more like a cartoon or the real animal? How and where should the limbs be attached (Does it have shoulders and hips?). What size should the eyes be?

I usually make these decisions the same way--Is this animal food for something else? If it is, the eyes go further back and to the side. I've found that herbivores just don't look right with eyes facing directly forwards. Rabbits look like dogs, sheep start looking like lions. I think it's one of those subconscious things where your brain is making decisions you're not aware of, but I could be wrong. The other biggie for me is the ears. If the animal is going to look "realistic" (for a knitted, stuffed thing) the ears get crimped and placed farther back and lower on the head. Almost no animals have aural cavities above their brow. If the animal is cartoonish, the ears sit much higher. They exist exclusively to enhance the cuteness.

Arms and legs are usually decided  in that order. Once the fore-limbs are attached, the legs usually need to go somewhere specific to make a cohesive piece. By that point, everything else usually falls into place.

So, without further ado, a slightly realistic armadillo and a very cartoonish kangaroo. 

 The armadillo is "Don the Dillo," a pattern which I cannot recommend to anyone as a first stuffed animal. It's pretty error riddled, which is okay since it's free, but could prove very frustrating to someone with no idea what they're doing. I did some shaping on the face to turn up the nose, crimped those ears and placed them lower so that they peak out of his shell like a real 'dillo, and moved his eyes to the side of his head. The original construction for this guy makes him look like Piglet from Winny the Pooh, which is pretty ironic considering I basically gave the kangaroo Pooh Bear's face.

 

This little guy is "King Aroo" sans crown and belly stripes. I don't feel like looking it up, but I'm pretty sure this pudgy kangaroo can't be a king because only female marsupials have pouches, since their ugly jellybean babies need to live there and nurse until they have things like eyes. and bones. Marsupials are weird.

(Weird marsupial factoid from your resident embryology graduate student: Marsupials fertilize multiple eggs at a time, but only have one joey at a time. They actually hold the other fertilized eggs in stasis just in case joey #1 dies [marsupials are crappy parents when it comes to caring for very young joeys]. If they lose joey #1, they can have joey #2 without needing to mate again by simply pulling that egg "out of the freezer" as it were. Awesome.)

But back to knitting. Because the kangaroo has the body of an ostrich egg, realism really wasn't ever on the table. I still follow my rule for eye placement. While Kangaroos are strictly herbivores, there isn't really anything to eat them, so they aren't too concerned with predators (especially since they can crane kick them across the Outback), therefore eyes go front. Ears are high and legs are silly.

So, that's what I've been working on. I'm a bit more than halfway through my pooling stole and I had the most terrible realization--what if hank #2 has a different stitch:color repeat ratio than hank #1. I may have to get creative in the very near future. More creative than usual. Hoo boy.

The Intervening Bunny Rabbit

I've been on a stuffed animal kick lately (mostly as a result of purchasing a bag of poly-fill.  That stuff is hard to store in a little apartment).  It works out rather handily since everyone I know is having children these days.  Stuffed animals have three real benefits: first, they are usually less than a foot tall and therefore take only a day or two to knit; second, they are easily gender neutral; third, they are cheap to make.

The downsides to them are usually things like seeming until your eyes and fingers want to bleed, and hand embroidering features on a knitted fabric.  I am not against embroidery, per se. I just suck at it rather royally.  Seeming, while time consuming, produces predictable, repeatable results.  It's really just a long game of connect the dots.  Embroidery is definitely a circle in my personal Inferno: I'm inefficient, have terrible aim, and heaven help me if it needs to be symmetrical.

That being said, this weekend's project was a bunny rabbit (this one) for an upcoming baby shower.  I love the results I got from this pattern, but I won't go so far as to say I love the pattern itself.  It was alright, but deviations were made.  First, I changed the head shape so that the bunny would have a jaw and nose.  The original pattern had a nearly circular head, and bunnies, well, don't.  Next, I knit inner ears a bit narrower and shorter than the brown outer ear.  If there is anything I dislike more than embroidery, it is hand-sewing non-knitted things to knitted things.  Third, I shrunk the arms a bit.  Originally I was going to change them to triangles which merged with the belly, but after re-examing, I decided that 20 rows would make them just right.

Then I had to put the face on this thing... four tries later, I feel moderately successful. I did a bit of shaping with the eyes--rabbits are herbivores, or rather food for carnivores, and surviving means seeing as much as you can as often as you can.  It's because of this that rabbits have eyes on the sides of their face rather than in front (like, say, a bear).  The nose is a simplified version of the rabbit nostril pattern, or a heart... take your pick.

This leads me to one of those things I always wonder about--how much should a stuffed animal look like a real one? Clearly most teddy bears aren't particularly bear shaped.  They are thin, have discrete, separate limbs, and large fluffy ears disproportionate to their body size.  But it's still a bear.  You still look at it and think, "that's a bear." If I tacked on an extra limb or made something inordinately large, you'd probably think, "that's an ugly bear... thing" but you'd still recognize it.  I have 2 pink rabbits from my childhood (must have been a sale). One of them is shaped like a bunny--it's a quadruped, and basically rabbit shaped, except maybe for some of its facial features and that pink fur.  The other is done in classic teddy bear style, sitting with big, floppy ears, and also very pink.  I'm pretty sure I was told at some point that this one was a rabbit, because it could just as easily be a dog.  All that to say I'm curious as to what makes a good stuffed animal.

But not so curious as to stop making them.  It's going to be hard to give this little guy away, even if he does have the legs of a Mara (which he totally does.  Look at those spindly things and tell me otherwise)

I'll get back to the sweater soon.  My life has been consumed by cables and I've got about 3" left before I never knit chart A again. After that it'll be more intellectually stimulating to knit.

The Intervening Teddy Bear

Occasionally (This is a word where I double all the consonants and have spell check correct me. Other words include license, and hemorrhaging. I am a miserable speller...)... Occasionally I get a wild hair and can't help myself.  I just have to knit thing "x," whatever it may be.  Sometimes it's a shawl or scarf, but usually it's mittens.  Saturday it was a teddy bear (this one).  I have made him once before in itty bitty fingering yarn, but this time I chose a super-bulk, roving style wool which I inherited from a nice lady in my college town upon her passing (I inherited a lot of yarn from her. I'm still working through it.) It's called Vail and clearly it was purchased long ago, because the company's logo has changed and the yarn itself has been discontinued.  Needless to say, I was quite lucky because I have about 2 yards left of the stuff post-bear.  Close call.

Pieces and Pieces of Bear

 He looks like the snuggle laundry detergent bear, and that is adorable.  The whole thing was knit in an evening--each piece is about 8 stitches wide and only a 30-40 rows long, so it goes by quickly.  I blocked them the next morning and started sewing him up.  I'm moderately obsessed with clean seams and I'm happier with this one than the last one, but not pleased as punch.  I did an alright job...

See--Snuggle

 When you knit for long enough, you start to develop things you either care about far too much or don't care about at all.  I don't generally care about stitch counts after I've established the pattern.  I also don't usually care about markers (usually.  Every once and a while I bust them out upon realizing my own folly). I probably care too much about my seams. I've been known to sew up a whole garment and take it apart again because it just wasn't right up in the armpits (you know, that place where everyone stares, waiting to judge your underarm joins. I see them staring.) I'm also sort of a bind-off fanatic.  There are about 80 gazillion ways to bind off.  I want to know them all. I am learning, slowly but surely.

D'awwww

As you can probably infer--I did not work on the grey sweater this weekend.  Still, I'm about 4 inches short of 2 sleeves and then it's a yard of cables before any major decisions need to be made.  Wish me luck.