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North Salt Lake, Utah, United States
I'm a woman with degrees in creative writing and cultural anthropology, experience in retail sales, merchant processing, teaching English as a foreign language, and archaeology, who teaches writing and computer classes at a local college, and works for a herpetology society. I also like to read, cook, knit, watch movies, make baskets, take photographs, craft, travel, and blog. I currently live in Utah with my husband, T, and our two dogs. Oh, and I'm a Cancer, which explains the crab thing.

Monday, February 11, 2013

Finger puppet fun

Sorry I haven't been posting on here much -- being pregnant has got my energy levels a little lower than usual, and my class schedule has me pretty busy this term.  But I do have a little knitting project I just finished that I thought I'd write about.

I made finger puppets for my little cousin for Christmas, and they were such a hit with the family, my mom requested I make some more for her to give as gifts to a friend's two boys.  The only patterns I have are for a mouse and an octopus, but she wanted 4 altogether.  So I thought about the variations I could make on those patterns, and came up with an elephant and a goldfish.  While the ideas came strictly from the original shapes, it was nice that they created thematic pairs, too.

Elephant and mouse
Octopus and goldfish
All of the finger puppets start on a cone-shaped base.  The mouse simply adds big ears and a tail, and then you embroider on the face.  I made his nose a little too big, and I set his ears a bit too low, but I still think he's cute.
For the elephant, I made a trunk by starting with a wider strip than the tail, put in a few rows of ribbing for the bend, slowly decreased, and then finished it off by casting off the final stitches to make a wide end instead of a pointed tip like the mouse tail.  The ears have just a few more rows than the mouse ears, making them a little wider, and I sewed more of the base to the head to make them more stable, and turned them wrong-side out for variety.  Then I added tusks by copying the decreases from the mouse tail to make them pointy.  And the eyes are just embroidered.

For the octopus, you start with the cone shape, and then instead of decreasing for the tip, you increase to make the round head and stuff it.  Then you knit 8 separate legs, sew them on, and finish with an embroidered face again.  In the original, you make the finger cone the same color as the octopus, but I decided to do his in blue this time.
The inspiration for the blue cone was the fact that there weren't going to be any legs to hide it on the goldfish.  I followed the same pattern, then knit a wide-based tail that increased, and three triangular fins.  I wanted the tail to be frilly, which I have done on a neck ruffle, doubling the stitches every row for a few rows.  However, the yellow yarn I was using was a finer gauge than the rest, and I couldn't seem to make it work right when I doubled the yarn, so after 4 or 5 tries I just did all the fins in garter stitch.  Then I embroidered on the lips and the eyes.

Personally, I think they all came out pretty good.  But I'll have to wrack my brain to come up with more animals next time!