Seeing that I’ve started knitting again, my mother sent me a kit which she thought would keep me amused for a few evenings. “Amused” turned out not to be the right word, though it has certainly kept me busy every evening last week, and all this weekend. It’s a kit for a toy dog, and claimed it came complete with everything needed except the stuffing. There were two balls of chenille effect yarn, knitting needles, a darning needle, thread, safety eyes, ribbon, fleece and instructions.
The “fleece” turned out to be brown felt; the knitting needles were cheap, nasty and far too flexible; the darning needle had too small an eye to fit the yarn; and the chenille yarn was an absolute pig to knit with. It is lovely and soft, but has absolutely no give in it whatsoever, and was so fluffy it was hard to see what I was doing. The instructions were riddled with errors and typos, and I’m sure that no one actually tried to knit the creature from the written details! There also wasn’t enough yarn provided to knit the dog as depicted in the picture – I had to make his last paw piebald as there wasn’t enough of either colour to complete it!
After a week of chunnering, this is what I was confronted with on Friday evening:
A load of knitted shapes - nineteen of the dratted things, no two identical
The small pathetic pile of yarn in the top centre of the image is the total remaining when I’d knitted all nineteen pieces. Talk about cutting it fine! I then had to sew it all together to make an approximation of the dog in the picture. That also wan’t easy – the instructions were incomplete, confusing and is some places plain incorrect! I sewed the front legs on back to front the first time round, and had to unpick them and try again! The instructions rather bravely provided the phone number of the woman who designed the kit, in case one needed help, and I was very tempted to phone it to tell her exactly what I thought of the instructions! In the end I muddled through, and ended up with a stuffed toy that looks nearly, but not quite, totally unlike the one in the picture!
A rather surprised and daft looking dog
