Sunday, February 21, 2016

What's got me excited.

It's always a pleasure to have an exciting project on the needles. Something that you can' trait to get back to. What's got me excited these days is a knitted dragon. This pattern by Kim Harrison is just beautiful. Somehow, she has created a graceful creature from cotton and pipe cleaners. Kim has included step-by-step video instructions with her pattern that are a huge help in removing all ambiguity.

I am listening to the Steven King detective novel, Mr. Mercedes, as I am working on it. The pattern has come to have some of the same tension for me as the novel. How will it all come together?

I have made some adjustments to her pattern to account for my supplies. Kim uses 3mm pipe cleaners as supports, but I could only find 6mm and I was in a hurry to start. So I bought some heavier weight yarn to knit a bigger dragon. I used 4-stitch I-cord for the wing bones, instead of 3 stitches. When I got to the hands, that wasn't going to work, so I used a bigger needle for the fingers and stuck with the 3-stitch I-cord.

I also wasn't going to muscle the pipe cleaner through all those I-cords. Kim has you threading it through on a needle, being careful not to catch the yarn. Instead, I just knit the I-cord around the pipe cleaner. Worked like a charm! I don't think I'm the first to do this.

As of this writing, I have all the dragon's limbs and have started on the tail. Today, we may see this creature start to come together. Can't wait!

Just a leg for now...

 

1 comment:

  1. Wow, super cool and such a different kind of project!

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