Continuing the Parade of Finished Objects

This is turning out to be the year of honoring friends with knitted gifts. Yes, and I did say friends and not just their children! So, kids-this may be the year I make you happy with legos because I'm saving the weird and crafty goodness for your moms this time around.

This one I had planned a year ago and it just didn't get done-or even begun. The story begins with the amazing store, Paxton Gate. Who sells this amazing ($124) item that one of my best friends fell in love with on a visit. Now (spending the amount of time on the computer that I do looking at weird things) I happened to know that the item was created from this pattern, that is all of $4. I knew what I must do-I bought the pattern right away and then sat on it-and did nothing. After incubating my plan for a full year I knit this very poorly and gave it to her full of love!

Yes, its a bit of a poor job. (I realize my Chinese side really comes out in these posts where I first dis everything I do and then show it to you anyways.) I didn't enjoy beginning at the bottom with 6 stitches in the round on size 3 dpns. It wasn't pretty and I started over a lot and still totally screwed it up but declared it good enough! It is a rat butt after all and the yarn is very hair like so won't it all just look round and fuzzy once I stuff it? Good Enough is totally my knitting mantra.

It was my first attempt at needle felting, which was fun and this was an easy thing to begin with-felting little blobs. Can do! I did end up removing the first organs that seemed too 2-dimensional (see above) and beefed them up a bit (see below). Its not anatomically accurate but I tried to allude to certain organs, a heart? For sure. A lung? Maybe that weird purple thing could be it, who knows? Our rat might have been a victim of vivisection before its posthumous dissection and so could be missing some crucial stuff. I guess my shoddy representation of rat anatomy is what I get for walking out of our 10th grade biology class. I'll just never know what it all that gunk really looks like.

I enjoyed looking at all the Lab Rat projects over on ravelry. A lot of folks seem to have loose interpretations of rodent anatomy and the results are all pretty cool. Although I could stand to practice some of these knitting techniques again I did enjoy the end product quite a bit-Happy Birthday Court!