P is for pterodactyl...

Recently something horrible happened. My lovely nan, the woman who effectively enabled and inspired this blog, died at home. I miss her terribly and only wish she could be here in October to see her newest great-grandson. In true form, the last thing she did before going to sleep that night was write 'blue wool' on her shopping list so that she could knit Baby Hart something. That is perhaps the most touching thing I will remember and simultaneously made the whole ordeal both better and worse.

What my nan did do was leave me all of her knitting needles and patterns in her will. I'll be honest and say I was excited to get my hands on them - mostly because of a set of books that I spent most of my youth studying and working through.

Nan was a big fan of Jean Greenhowe the woman behind the scarecrow family that used to be on one of the stops of the Playdays bus (remember that?!). As a child, I loved her creations and nan knitted the majority of them for me. Every week in the school holidays we would bike to Roys of Wroxham to see if she had a new book out and shriek with joy when she did. I now find myself in possession of upward of 20 of these pattern books and, I suppose as a way of coping with my grief, I wanted to knit something right away.

The choice was easy in the end. The first thing I ever knitted from a pattern from start to finish was a little yellow dinosaur with orange spots and his caveman friend. These patterns were in her 'Toy Collection' (1989, Jean Greenhowe Publications) book and you can see pictures of them here. It made sense to go back and create some more cute dinosaurs, so I did! I knitted two 'flying reptiles' and two 'cave people' (pg13-14). Greenhowe's patterns are devilishly easy to follow and these are no exception. The cavemen are knitted all in one go and then stitched up at the end, so are dead quick to make. All four took me less than two evenings to create from start to finish. But what to do with them?

It was around this time that I spotted some wallpaper on a bourgeois home improvement tv show (again, it was on in the background when I was knitting. Promise.) and developed a slight obsession. After many an hour of Internet searches I found it here; 'Jolly Jurassic' fun dinosaur paper! Absolutely perfect for Baby Hart's room. So, with a wall of dinosaurs already, I figured the perfect thing to do was turn my knitted creatures into a cot mobile. And so I did. I'm not sure if the cavemen will ever catch their prey, but they're having a good try!