Monday, April 30, 2007

Knitting: Dragonslayer

Waaaay back in January I made this dragon from Knitty. The pattern calls her Norberta, but I made her in purple with green spines and I thought she looked more like a Hortense, so that's what I called her. Unfortunately, she turned out too loose -- so loose that her stuffing stuck out of the holes in her head. Trouble is, I'm an arch-anthropomorphizer, so I can neither destroy nor discard anything with which I have endowed a personality. And I had already named her Hortense. So she sat in the corner with no face for months, waiting for me to either come to terms with her flaws or harden my heart sufficiently to do what needed to be done.

Last weekend, I decided my heart was hard enough. Sort of. I took out Hortense, stood her up on the sofa with my yarn cutter, and explained that she had no quality of life there in the corner with no face, and it was time to undergo surgery that would make things better for both of us. I had to reassure her very emphatically that I would knit her again even better in order to make the first cut. At least she couldn't look at me reproachfully because she had no face.

So I took her apart. It was awful. There was a point of black despair when I thought I was going to end up with a bunch of two-inch scraps of yarn. My husband, seeing how het up I was, thought he would make me feel better by telling me I was a dragonslayer now. It made me cry instead. But in the end, all was well. I managed to salvage most of the yarn and now that I'm using 4s instead of 6s, I don't need as much anyway. I've got her back, belly and spines done, and now I just have to work on the legs and wings.

But it was a very eventful time.

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