Muppet hat for my little Animal

Let me set the scene: I'm in the cinema with the Dilley family (watched The Artist, which is truly superb) and a trailer comes on for the upcoming Muppet movie. Cue general excitement. It is around this time that Rachael mentions seeing knitted Muppet hats on the Internet and I know that I won't be happy until I've had a go myself. Knitting inspiration really is an itch that must be scratched!

Now, obviously, I have only procreated to have a little subject for all of my knitting trials. Not entirely true, of course, but it is fun knitting for him! So I set about knitting Noah an Animal inspired hat because he's our little drummer boy. I started by blocking the pattern out on graph paper, copying a picture of Animal from the film magazine. It took a few goes to make it symmetrical but I got there in the end. I cast on 62 stitches in the round on three double-pointed UK/US size 7 needles and knitted a 1" band in seed stitch (k1,p1 then p1,k1 on alternate rounds). For the body, I used one strand of orange yarn and one strand of fluorescent pink to give the random, mottled colours of his fur. I then used intarsia to create the face. At the top, I decreased stitches evenly around before breaking and threading the yarn to cast off.

Now, sadly, my son has been gifted the gigantic head of his daddy, so it's not the best fit in the world, but I'm sure he'll get at least one week's wear out of it. Maybe then I'll make him a Beaker one to replace it...

NB: If you'd like the pattern, drop me a line! Happy to oblige :)
        suziknitsandgiggles@googlemail.com

Fair Isle Fishies

Apologies, regular readers, for my lack of blogging of late. You'll probably be aware that I was in the family way, right? Well, that is now not the case and all of my time is being taken up by my handsome boy, Noah Richey. But I wouldn't be me if I didn't have a few knitting projects on the go, they're just taking a bit longer these days...

When I finished work for my maternity leave, I had two weeks until my due date (which turned out to be just under three weeks in the end). With little else to do except sit around getting increasingly more unwieldy, I decided to take on an ambitious project. I've used intarsia on a number of occasions but never to make a jumper or on the scale required by a Fair Isle pattern. "What the hell," I thought. "It'll keep me busy, if nothing else."

The pattern in question was to create a Fair Isle jumper with a fish pattern from the 'Stitch 'N' Bitch Superstar Knitting' book (Stoller, 2010, Workman). The Life Aquatic jumper by Serena Murphy was fun and quirky and looked just about challenging enough. It is knitted on circular needles in one go - something that I encountered for the first time when knitting my lace heart jumper. This makes it feel like you are completing the jumper in record time because I had knitted up to the arm joins in a matter of days. You then have to knit the arms on double point needles and work the pattern chart for the first time. The benefit of this is that you can practise it before you get to the more complicated cowl neck.

Once the arms are knitted, you have to join them to the body and knit all the way across all 290 stitches (phew!) which results in a very heavy knitting project. I certainly felt like I had arms of steel by the end! The only real tricky bit was remembering which rows needed decreases in the number of stitches and making sure that the pattern still looked right. The main benefit of knitting in a circle is that you can do all of the colour changes in Garter stitch, which I find much easier.

Anyway, I finished the jumper the day I went into labour. It's almost like he was waiting, eh? And I got to wear my beautiful jumper over Christmas because that's the best time to wear knitwear, after all.

Happy New Year, everyone. May 2012 be the year you learn a new skill, complete all of your unfinished projects and go on many more knitting adventures!