my cheating heart

Madly in love with her though I may be, my little KBull didn't prime me for success. I fear I won't be posting an FO any time soon. I'm trudging ever-so-slowly through my current projects, and feeling a bit mentally defeated by Ye Olde Knucks. I'm about 4/5ths of the way through, but I'm so dreading the embroidery that I've started to drag my feet a bit. Add to that a very keen frustration at dealing with the "gaps between the fingers" that Ms. Grossman talks about so nonchalantly in her pattern. Indeed. Now the gloves have big, fat webbing in-between the fingers... all because of my clumsy stitching efforts. A renewed interest in reading isn't helping matters much.

As such, I decided to cheat and post a picture of my last FO. Mwaaahahahahahahahahaaaaa!


In all fairness, this will be the last stuffed toy I knit for a great long while. And he's lovely, really... isn't he? He needs to have his time to shine, bless his little bunny heart.

Pattern details:

The Bunster's pattern came from Last-Minute Knitted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson. Note that at two weeks to complete there was nothing last-minute about it, but at least I made my deadline. This was in the 6 to 8 hour gift section of the book (divided by time...genius!), but with the frog factor it took me more along the order of 14 hours to finish.

I substituted the altogether lovely but ridiculously expensive Blue Sky Alpaca sportweight (doubled!) with non-doubled Rowan Calmer that knit up to the same gauge. I used Calm for the main and Sugar for the ears. It wasn't so much the expense that drove me to choose another yarn as the fact that the recipient is an infant. If it turns out that this baby latches onto Bunster (e.g. drools and vomits on, drags around, etc.) I want it to be washable for mom & dad. Also, alpaca can be kinda itchy for some folks.

Other variations: I knit most of this on a set of double-points rather than on two circulars like it suggests. This was only slightly more confusing during the increase and decrease rounds, but not too terrible. I also discovered that something I heard speculated on KnittingHelp.com is true: if one double-point is one size smaller or larger than the rest, it does not show up in the work. Neato, huh?

Lastly, I stuffed the bunny with scrap yarn rather than getting filler. The consistency is great, but you can see the color of the yarn through the work. Keep that in mind if you're thinking of doing something similar. I used a reddish-maroon yarn, and my husband quickly pointed out that it was "like guts". Which he thought was cool.

As a final touch, Bunster's "tatt" is custom-work, too. Cause he's all street.