Showing posts with label bad knitting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bad knitting. Show all posts

17.12.15

The Teddy Bear of Doom


How can something so innocent looking cause so many headaches? And yet it did. Back in the spring, I decided to have a bash at making a needle felted teddy bear. Not my usual thing, but I wanted to see if I could. And it took months. Months of picking it up, putting it down, leaving it for weeks at a time and almost giving up. Bits were cut off, bits were stuck back on. It became known as 'The Teddy Bear of Doom'. But I persevered and eventually finished the darned thing. Then came the knitting.


I rarely knit. But I wanted to make a little vest for him. By now it was a 'him'. I used four needles, as I'm more comfortable with four (like socks, which I haven't made for 25 years). Bought a gorgeous ball of soft aqua wool. Cast on, using my own apparent common sense.


How hard could it be to knit a little vest, freehand? All weekend difficult, that's how much. I discarded my first attempt and began another.


So small. So fiddly. So infuriating. It wasn't going to beat me.


After many, many knitting hours, I had finished. Only to discover the big, glaring design flaw. I hadn't thought about the head opening. So it sat on his head like a mushroom cap. At which point, I gave up.


So I did what I should have done in the first place and needle felted him a vest. Took a couple of hours. Not a couple of days.


Then he was thread jointed.


 And so his head, arms and legs swivelled, like a proper teddy bear.




He is one of the largest things I've made, and sits snugly in the hand. I guestimated he took over 50 hours, but that was with a lot of tinkering and remaking. 


And he was, in the end, worthy of his own special tag - named after a tiny village in Shropshire, not a million miles away from where I live. 


The essential problem with him was that he was bigger than my natural making scale. I remembered an early  project from long ago, when I was commissioned to make a monkey. I had to abandon my first gigantic attempt, but the second, smaller one was just right. I blogged my shame and called it 'A Tale of Two Monkeys'

But recently, I got the urge to start another jointed figure. This time, non-teddy bear (not really 'me'), but a small fox. And this one is going exactly to plan. So far.