Sunday, January 18, 2015

Tiny crochet whale - 3D

I needed a project I could work on during a movie that needed minimal attention to gauge.  I went through my queue and too many things required a lot of charts, or some design work that would have me staring at my computer.  This is a project I'd need to look at line by line, but I also could finish it while watching my move. (What movie was I watching? Captain America: The Winter Soldier)


I started crocheting with 11 g brava bulky in celestial that I had in my remnant stash.  I used a size E 3.5 mm crochet hook even though my yarn was thicker than what the Tiny Whale Crochet pattern called for.  The pattern has great step by step pictures that accompany the row instructions.  I love it when crochet patterns have this because things are so much more modular than knitting.  It really helps me when I would have trouble seeing things spatially otherwise.

I don't know how to do an invisible crochet decrease, and since I'm watching a movie (very exciting action movie!), I didn't want to stop to look it up on YouTube.  I therefore did Sc-2-tog to decrease.  (What a knitter way to write that out, eh?)


Around Row 6 I had 7 g left of yarn.  It was becoming quickly apparent that I would not have enought yarn to finish this small whale.  I had two choices:  1) rip it out and start over in a new color, or 2) finish the Celestial yarn and then add another color for the rest of the whale.  I chose option 2.  You don't see many two tone whales out there, but this is really just something for fun rather than an important project.  Plus, it could give me an opportunity to actually bust up some of my every growing stash.  (seriously, I keep TRYING to make it smaller but it just keeps growing bigger and bigger.  I don't have a similar blue in my stash, so I picked the lime green that was the contrasting color for Lucky's birthday party theme.


Thankfully whoever shipped me the safety eyes labeled the packages with a 6 and an 8.  Otherwise I never would have remembered what sizes I had!  I selected the size 8 mm safety eyes for this little whale.  Because this is crocheted in a spiral, it was hard making sure I had the placement in the right spot but in the end I'm sure that it is fine.


Keith and I had a genius idea to make this rattle.  I took two coke bottle caps, filled them with some seed beads and then covered them with tin foil and tape.  I inserted these inside of the whale and VOILA, a rattle.  (The first idea was to fill a ping pong ball with beads, but I had finished too much of the whale for that to work.)  I used two bottle caps and the vulnerable sides (tinfoil/tape) are in the middle, so it should be hard to puncture.


I ran out of blue yarn after row 15.  I needed just two grams of the green yarn (peapod) to finish up the tail.  I was SO CLOSE to one color.


I'm so happy that i turned this into a rattle.  When I sewed the robot  I regretted not adding something that rattled in the middle.


It is too bad I didn't have all yarn in one color, but now this whale really fits the theme of Lucky's first birthday party.  I hope that he likes this present!