Last Minute Dogs...

 It never pays to get complacent - these dogs were a commission that I got about a fortnight ago, to knit replicas of a pair of beloved pets.  I thought I was going to have some spare time to prepare for Christmas!  These did not go to plan - I started the lurcher using a ball of yarn I had of a discontinued line, hoping that it would be enough. It wasn't.  I was lacking two legs worth.  So I ordered something similar and hoped for the best.  When I started another dog with the new yarn, I realised it was a bit too thick, but I had to soldier on as there was no choice in the matter.  Then when I went to a garden centre last Friday, I found that they had a few balls of the original yarn in their craft section - hooray!  So that saved a lot of extra work!

The second dog is a French Bulldog.  Due to time constraints, I was not able to come up with my own pattern, but vaguely remembered that there was a pattern in the book Best in Show, Knit Your Dog.  Note to self: NEVER use this book again.  In fact, throw it away.  Right now. Put it in the bin.

For a start, the dimensions for the body were way too large for the head.  So I improvised, missed out a 6 stitch increase and used smaller needles.  Then when it came to knitting the  head, which is done on the stitches left on the two side sections, the instructions were so confusing that I ended up unravelling it and starting again as I had done it completely wrong.   As for sewing the thing together, the instructions are so meagre that they were just about no help at all.  The head before shaping looks like a long bag - all you are told to do is fold it up and stitch to head to form nose....huh?  If you do that, you are left with a wadge of fabric with nowhere to go.  It took me over an hour to experiment with shaping and moulding it into some resemblance of a face - it's a good job I am a very experienced knitter & also one that makes a lot of knitted animals.  No novice would have been able to make this pattern successfully.  There are no diagrams, very little help at all.  This is not the first time I have come a cropper with this book  - the patterns are very badly written, with making up instructions that are unclear and fail miserably.  On top of that, the actual dogs that result from these patterns look amateurish and shoddy unless you spend a lot of time fiddling and needle shaping.  It really annoys me that this book is a best seller when it feels to me that the patterns were either rushed, or not proof-read & given to some knitters to try out first.  I know from preparing for the Nudinits book that we were extremely careful to make the patterns accessible to any knitter, whatever their skill level, and made sure that we actually knitted the items again from the written patterns to ensure they were correct and as mistake-free as possible.

Rant over!  I got there in the end and just in time for posting before Christmas.  I'm taking today off!