Not Identical Twins

As I mentioned last week, I've been working on a larger knitting project for a few weeks, that wasn't ready to be revealed.  But it's now in the mail, so it's time to post!  A good friend of mine just had twins, and I decided to knit a few of the toys out of the book Toys to Knit by Tracy Chapman.  The patterns are sooo cute, and it's a new book to me, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I picked the monkey (from the cover) and the penguin for their cuteness.  I thought they would be about the same size, although the finished size of the toys isn't mentioned in the book.

I did make some color decisions that were different from the book.  I went with a variegated brown yarn for the monkey, and decided to use white for the areas on him that should have been buff -- that way, I could use the same white from the penguin.  And I figured I would use yarn from my stash for the monkey's vest.  The scarf to go with it seemed like overkill.

As I got into the knitting, I realized that EVERYTHING was going to be knit flat and then sewn together.  I don't like sewing my knitting together very much, but I decided, at least the first time through, to just follow the directions as they were written.  That meant that, by the time I was done, I had a total of 15 different parts to sew together.

Yes, I laid him out like a skeleton from "Bones"

The body was done in three parts, and I still don't understand why you couldn't shape the front the same way the back was shaped.  The arms and legs were knit flat, separate from the hands and feet, when they could have been knit in the round with a color change, which would have made everyone's lives easier.  OK, just mine.  Oh, and I opted to just pick up stitches on either side of the head for the ears, instead of sewing them on, as suggested in the book.  Also, maybe it was because of the yarn I chose from my stash, but the first vest I knit was much, much too small, so I had to make it a few rows longer and almost twice as wide to fit him.  And for some reason, the front and back pieces of my head didn't match up, but I'm sure that was due to knitter error, not the pattern.  *wink*  To make things worse, there were very few sewing directions.  It just said "sew as shown in the photo," but with the photo monkey wearing both a scarf and a vest, you couldn't see how the arms and head went on at all!  Very frustrating for someone who hasn't sewn together a lot of toy parts before.  It took forever for me to sew everything up, and there was a delay as I ran out of polyfill part way through, but when all was said and done, here's how he looked:

A very tall monkey

The other pattern I picked was the penguin.  As soon as I started knitting, I realized they were not going to be anywhere near the same size.  But at least the penguin had a lot less pieces.

Penguin pieces

And, actually, there is one extra piece in that photo that didn't go into the penguin.  Can you see the shaping on the piece that looks like the right-hand body panel (yeah, I forgot I'd knit this "extra" piece and got confused as I was laying him out)?  That's the wing, as knit according to the pattern directions.  Again, the photo in the book has a black wing against a black body, so I have no idea what it was supposed to look like.  But the directions said to knit the wing in stocking stitch, which meant the whole thing just curled up into a tube!  I took it upon myself to knit them in seed stitch, which I think looked nice texturally.  I was surprised to discover that the body was just a front and a back panel.  Next time I make one of these, I plan on figuring out how to do 2 back body panels and a triangular base piece, so that he actually has a little tail.  Maybe I could turn the white belly, like I was turning a heel?  I don't know, I'd have to practice that one a little.  Also, the pattern called for knitting the monkey with doubled yarn, I assume so that the stuffing wouldn't show through when you stuffed him.  They didn't do the same for the penguin, and I kinda wished they had.  Again, I couldn't see how they had sewn on the wings, so I just sewed straight across the top, leaving them long and floppy.  I think they look sweet that way.  I also had trouble figuring out how to sew his head together so that it looked the same as in the book.  But here he is:

cute little penguin

Since I took both photos on our rolltop desk, you can compare the height of the cubbies to see how much smaller the penguin is than the monkey.  I feel bad for whichever twin gets the little guy -- these two are definitely not identical!  But hopefully, by the time they get big enough to decide whose is whose, whoever has the penguin will love him enough to make up for his smaller stature.  And in the meantime, I hope that the packages of onesies that went along with the gift will help out their mom and dad.  *smile*