A caterpillar for Henry
A couple of years ago I was in a yarn shop poking around and I found this really soft yarn in pastel colors. Dave and I had just decided to start trying to get pregnant, and so with visions of cuddly baby blankets and hats floating around in my head, I picked out three skeins and headed to the register. When I imagined my pregnant self, it involved me sitting on the couch, huge, with a box of Dare chocolate cookies on one side of me and a baby-related knitting project on the other. As soon as the second pink line showed up on the pregnancy test, I had an over-whelming desire for salad (the cookies came later) and absolutely no desire to knit. I knit one little sweater and that was it. Those three skeins have been knocking around in my stash while Henry has quickly outgrown the pastel baby stage and leaped into the primary colors of toddler-hood.
While perusing various knitting sites I came across this caterpillar pattern. I thought it was very cute and wanted to make it but didn't know what yarn to use. I went digging around and came up with the three skeins purchased oh-so-long ago. The yarn is Patons Pixie which I'd like to go on the record as stating is the worst yarn to knit with. It actually squeaked on the needles as I was knitting. On the plus side, it's fuzzy enough to hide any mistakes or weird seaming issues you may encounter. Of course, it may also be the reason why you made mistakes and had problems seaming in the first place. I used two strands held together, one pale blue and the other pale green. My guage was off but since it's a simple pattern I decided I didn't care, Henry would just have a large caterpillar. It worked up very quickly. I managed to screw up the increases on a few of the bumps which meant I had to go back and close up some resulting holes, but that was easy enough. I used a black boucle yarn for the eyes and mouth. I initially tried embroidery thread but it disappeared into the Pixie so I needed something with more heft. Aren't you dying to see a picture of the finished product? Promise me you won't laugh:
To give you a better idea of the size, here's one of Henry playing with it. He likes it!
