Meet Smith. I love him lots. Even if one eye is slightly bigger than the other…
Smith by Ysolda Teague
Yarn: Sirdar Donegal Tweed (spikes)
Teddy Sonnet (body)
This is such a fun, quick, easy pattern. I started him on on a Friday night, finished knitting his head on Saturday night, and added the eyes and nose on Sunday morning, but if you were more studious than I he could easily be finished in a day.
Although the construction is straight forward he is a bit of a fiddly knit. The whole thing is knit seamlessly in the round, with the spikes knit separately and attached to the body as you go along. Whilst this isn’t in itself a complicated process, as more spikes are knit on to the body things start to become a little bulky, and once you have 6 or 7 spikes attached and start to decrease for the front of the body, things can get a tiny bit tricksy.
The hardest part of this project for me were the French knots for the eyes and nose. I can French knot on flat surfaces, but the knotting for this is done after it’s all stuffed and sewn up. Perhaps I was going about it all wrong, but I found it a little difficult knot securely onto the knitting and bury the ends safely enough so that the 2 year old Smith was destined for wouldn’t pull his face off! I managed to fudge it in the end, but if I was going to knit this again I might find some other way of doing the nose as I’m not entirely happy with how that turned out. Or maybe I just need to practice my French knots! I’m probably going to have lots of opportunity since I bought Ysolda’s Otto, Sophie and Elijah patterns when she had her birthday sale last week. I apparently seem to have decided to knit a menagerie for my goddaughter!
Overall though, this is a fantastic little knit with a lot of character, and I love him to bits. If you follow me on twitter you might have noticed that it was with a little bit of reluctance that I let him go in the end, although I’m sure he’s much better off with the little girl he now lives with :)
