Big Sammy!

Hello. I have been doing another knitted drawing, a little one, for Catherine. She has a big silly dog called Sammy, and she wanted a knitted representation of him in lurid technicolour. Well, I added the technicolour bit, that's how I do things y'see. I have met Sammy twice. The first time he lolloped about and made me nervous. The second time he sat nicely and only tried to eat an entire cake once.

Here is beautiful Sammy, posing for his royal portrait.



His front feet and tail are missing off this photo but you can imagine what they look like.

So what I did next was draw Sammy onto some squared paper and then colour in all the squares methodically. I decided to go for blue and green, told Catherine I was going to knit it with dark blue and greys (so it wasn't all black), and then changed my mind afterwards. So here's that.



He's just such a fabulous model, I love it.

Then I knitted it. This turned out to be a harder task than I had anticipated, partly because I had accidentally coloured some squares half one colour and half another, so I had to kind of wing it in places. Came out all right though. I did it in four parts and sewed them together.



Looking at all the pictures together, it's kind of obvious that I forgot (again) that knit stitches are not square, they are wider than they are tall. So if you make a knitting pattern with square stitches, it will come out squatter and wider than it's supposed to. Luckily, this drawing is small enough that it doesn't really matter. It still looks like Majestic Sammy.

Just look at that face.



I haven't even showed this to Catherine yet but I hope she'll enjoy it. I hope Sammy feels that it is a flattering representation. I think it's quite funny to get a portrait of your pet made, especially a knitted one, but it's also kind of amazing. I might make a portrait of my parents' four cats sitting together like a nice family, and not running away from each other or smacking each other round the face like they do normally. Or all fighting to sit on my dad.