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Finger Puppet Jungle

You'll remember my son,  asked me at Christmas to knit a set of hand puppets for his daughter, my grand daughter, M.  I may or may not be able to figure out how to make hand puppets, but I knew I could knock out a quick set of finger puppets and we agreed, for now, that was a nice start.

My jungle of finger puppets so far
Between my Fair Isle toque knitting I managed to create a few puppets.  First there's the friendly, furry Lion.  I'm using the same free pattern designed by Kerrie Rycroft found on knitty.com used back in January 2012.  But this time I tried to improve the overall look.  The mane of the lion was improved with Tena's suggestion I treat it like fringe.  This secures the mane and with a few quick brushes with a needle the wool becomes frizzy and from my POV more lion mane like.



With Tiger I decided to forego the around the body stripes and use the Fair Isle technique instead.  This makes the stripes look more realistic, again in my opinion.  The tiger also got the fringe treatment only it was cropped very short.




Elephant received the least revisions; in fact, if you look at this version and the one done in 2012 you'll see except for a change in the colour of the yarn, they have a lot in common.



The only puppet to finish is the most important.  M is often referred to as "a little monkey" by her father.  So it is vital I make a good looking monkey.  I've found the pattern on the blog, Oh Yes I Knit and plan on moving forward on it just as soon as I find the right colour brown in my stash.  More about this latter.

As for the blue/gray man's toque, well, I've run into a couple of small snags:
  1. Redesigning the top, for me, was more challenging than I anticipated.  I am sure that comes as no surprise to you, you know me.  But I'm always surprised to learn this about myself.
  2. The lighter blue colour in the variegated yarn does not offer enough contrast with the gray yarn and thus gets lost in a sea of gray.  I need to remove several rows, cut out the lighter blue from the ball, reattached a proper blue colour and reknit the removed rows.  Not difficult, but I haven't tackled it yet.
So you're all caught up on my knitting for the week.  BTW, I finally saw the movie American Hustle.  I know I'm late to that game, but I found it well worth the time and money.  Maybe because I so vividly remember the late 1970's, maybe because I'm a U.S. citizen no longer living in the U.S., maybe because I've always been distrustful of loan sharks, but the entire content seemed quite believable to me.  It is also worth it just to see Jennifer Lawrence steal every scene she's in, what a remarkable young talent.  (There, you get a movie recommendation to boot!) 


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