Shell Shocked

I am FINALLY done with my toy knitting marathon this week and I gotta say, while I loved Sheldon in the beginning, we did not part ways on happy terms. It was definitely a relationship gone sour-he was just so cute and it felt so right, he charmed me with his humor and charming little black eyes....but, alas, by the end I wanted to stick my DPNs right into those beady little eyes of his and throw him in the road.

Oh, the knitting wasn't bad-it was fun and I really did enjoy making all of his components. I even wowed my own self with doing some things I had avoided for years in my knitting-like a crocheted edge-and I had all his parts finished and laid out Friday nite ready to be assembled Saturday morning and presented to his new owner at 1:00. That is where the trouble began-he is removable from his shell you see, which is an adorable feature (a naked little turtle body, teehee! so cute!!) or so it seems. The problem with this is that the shell must be made as a "suit", if you will, into which his little nudie body goes. Making his snuggly little shell into a suit requires an attachment panel to be knit separately from the actual shell and then attached using a 4 stitch I-cord which gives it a really nice, finished look-but almost caused me to take the scissors to that little yarnphibian! You have to pick up stitches through both the shell "pillow" (the blue and green part) and through the separate attachment panel and work that picked-up stitch into an I-cord by slipping the last stitch of the cast on I-cord stitches and replacing it with the picked up stitch-make sense? Not so much to me either at first. After some brainstraining and a fair amount of caffeine, I thought I understood it and got to work. Oh man-it took me almost 2 HOURS!! The turtle was small and the yarn was slippery and terribly splitty and the DPNs were size 3 and my hands cramped and my mouth swore and my baby screamed as I attached his little shell together with a pretty little I-cord:

I finished it at 12:00 and whipped all four of his little legs and 2 yarn eyes (I was worried about the little plastic kind being a choking hazard since the recipient is only 1) on in fifteen minutes (no slow and steady would win this race! I still hadn't even gotten out of my jammies to be at the stinkin' party!) At last, we made it to the party, showered and smiling, and gave Sheldon to cute little 1 year old Baby Zeke who promptly shoved him into his mouth, tasted him, and then threw him on the floor and moved on to his next gift.


It will be awhile before I knit another Sheldon...or speak to that Baby Zeke.