Mine and Semi-Mine

A little while after I started knitting and making stuffies I was over at my host parents house for dinner. That night their son Andrew told me about his biggest wish for Christmas. He wanted a stuffed animal Lilo and Stitch Experiment 345. Unfortunately no one makes such Elastico (the name of the experiment). So I had my work cut out for me. At that point I had knitted enough stuffed animals from Knitted Wild Animals so I started experimenting with the forms.

I started with the hands. The first hand I made had fingers but the wrist was all wrong. In order to fix that I made a second one with a modified wrist and thumb pattern. In order to safe me some time I did not give this trial piece fingers though. On the finished stuffie I did a combination. I used the second wrist and thumb and gave it the fingers from the first trial. I modified the fingers in the finished one by knitting them in the round instead of straight with seaming.

Then I worked on the body. This part was fairly easy. I just had to get the placement of the purple dot in the middle right. Again I ended up making two and got it right on the second trial.

Then came the most daunting part. I had to make the head.... As you can see it is not the easy kind of head. It is actually constructed of a total of 11 pieces: the head itself, the white mask, two dark green eye patches, a nose, and three "spikes" on top each made out of two pieces. I found the finished product rather creepy and jokingly called it the creepy alien clown every time I talked to my host parents about him.

Making the arms and legs was fairly easy. I finished him just in time. An hour before I went over to my host parents house on Christmas Eve.

Andrew (the lucky 7-year-old) was very happy about the end-product. And Elastico is well cared for now. He gets to sleep in the bed every night and is kept safe from any harm. He even gets to take refuge in the car when something is happening in the house ;)

Apart from this big pre-Christmas project, I also experimented with the patterns I had in the books. I changed the monkey body from Knitted Wild Animals . My modified version is wearing a jacket and a blue tie. Doing this was sort of confusing at first, because I had only been knitting for a few short weeks and did not really know too much about patterns and how to best modify things and figure out how everything will fit together in the end product etc... but I figured it out. I like Mr. Monkey with the tie. He is very cute and was adopted into our stuffie collection.