FO: Andy the Owl

Hello everyone, here I am back from a lovely few days away at a spa, and with a brand new finished project to show you! Those of you who are regular readers of my blog will already know of my love of owls. They seem to be very "on trend" at the moment but I have collected them in various guises since I was very small and used to dress up in a brown poncho and flap my "wings"! I'm not really keen on the fact that owls are now "in fashion" and am secretly waiting for them to fade out so I can be unusual again...and so I am not tempted to purchase everything in owl shape I see in the shops!! Given my slight obsession, it was never going to be long before some of my feathered (or in this case, not so feathered!) friends started popping up around these parts. So with this in mind, I would like to introduce you too...Andy the Owl!

He was so named because I sewed him together whilst watching Andy Murray storm to victory in the tennis to claim a well-deserved gold medal. As I type this, I have just watched him win a silver in the mixed doubles. Isn't the Olympics addictive?! Go Team GB! My boyfriend is displeased with the lack of alliteration in the naming, but I am currently drawing a blank at British Olympians starting with an O!

The pattern for this cushion come from a bumper pattern magazine/booklet called The Ultimate Knitting Stylebook, which I would highly recommend...there is so much I want to knit from here! I started knitting this on my commute to work a few months ago, although when it came to the coloured front it became too big to transport so I knitted the rest in front of the TV. This project was an opportunity to practise working with colour including intarsia and stranding...many a time I got all the balls of wool in a tangle and had to stop to unravel them! However, this did make for a nice neat wrong side, as you can see in one of the pictures below.

I also had a chance to practise my crochet skills for the front frills...it has been a while since my crochet class and I have not done any since then, but I was pleased that I was able to pick it up again quite quickly, once I had translated the instructions!

This was a great project to use up scraps of wool I had in my stash from other projects. Because of this I used wool of different thicknesses which has resulted in a little but of tightness around the eye area in particular where I was also stranding behind - however hopefully this is not too obvious! You may also notice that Andy is looking a little flat - this is because I ran out of stuffing, so poor Andy will have to wait until next weekend when I am able to pick up some more, but I just couldn't wait to share him with you.

I hope you have all had a lovely weekend. Anyone else out there enjoying the Olympics? It is so easy to just sit and watch it all day long - I am not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow where it will be so much harder to get my fix!!!

K xx