I am on another deadline. This time it is an owl that is going to Portland. Tomorrow. That is why I was binding off the second eye at 1:00 in the morning (I have not sewn them onto the facial disk yet). I still have to make the feet and I am half-way done with the second wing.
The owl is Hansi Singh’s design. Masterful – and challenging with lots of shaping with short rows, increases and decreases. The eyes begin with casting on 4 stitches and then joining in the round. Yeah, it’s like that. But it works and the owl is charming. (I will photograph it when it has 2 full wings, feet and eyes that are attached – which had better be sometime tomorrow morning before we drive to Portland!)
I have complicated my process somewhat by making the owl sort of tweedy – holding together 2-3 strands of yarn. And I decided that it needed white bars on the wings. So, last night I was knitting with my Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds at my side.
The reason I stopped working on the second wing and jumped ahead to the eyes was a point of confusion -- rooted in my assumption that the wings would be symmetrical (in shape and in relation to each other), as well as my tendency to think of the “right wing” as being on the right from the owl’s perspective (the way I might refer to my “right arm”) instead of on the right side from the knitter’s perspective, i.e., facing the owl. So, yeah, I started making the “right wing” on the left side of the owl. And since there is some nice shaping to make the wing particularly wing-like (not symmetrical like a leaf), it seemed to matter. Fortunately, I caught the error before I actually began the asymmetrical shaping, so I painstakingly reversed the shaping directions (having experience with “make right side as the left reversing all shaping”).
It was somewhere in the process of knitting the wing (with 3 strands of yarn and a color change and white bars added) while working the shaping backward that I let my eyes wander ahead in the directions and re-read the instructions for the “left wing” which said: Work the left wing identically to the right wing.
Identically. Not symmetrically. Not “reversing all shaping.” Not a mirror image of the asymmetrical wing, but a twin to it. The same wing worked twice. Fiendishly clever – the wings would have a quirky realism with one wing sort of swooping toward the body while the other shrugs away from the body. You gotta hand it to Ms Singh.
And so, what was I to do but finish the “right wing” with the shaping done backward and then commence the “left wing” – again with the shaping done backward (i.e., identically to the right wing). While holding 3 strands together and managing the artsy color change and putting in those blasted white bars – all on the opposite side from the “right wing.”
About half-way through the “left wing,” my brain was quite done being twisted around all of this and I retreated to the eyes. Joining 4 stitches in the round and increasing drastically to make the circles – in slippery gold rayon! – was, well if not exactly a piece of cake, a more straightforward challenge. I have not looked at the instructions for the feet yet –perhaps the toes are crossed?
But tonight, I have to bust it out. Back to the wing – where I am running out of one of the 3 yarns and will have to get creative. Maybe all the asymmetry will work in my favor – one could argue that the light shines differently on the swooped wing than on the shrugged wing. And I will have to make the feet – crossed toes or no crossed toes.
And although it is already quite late in the evening, I do have the eyes of an owl. They are in a Ziploc in my knitting bag.
Love her designs! I can't wait till there is room in my knitting bag to make one!
Posted by: Angoragoblin | October 19, 2009 at 11:57 PM