Animal Planet, Continued

After I got done making the penguin, I decided that I had better continue on with my animal production.

You see, we have a lot of brown fur yarn in our store.

Since you have just read about the penguin, you probably have it figured out: At market, I had also insisted that we buy a lot of brown fur. There was also a new squirrel pattern, and we needed yarn for squirrel tails. "Come on, Kim!" I said. "We live in Pennsylvania. Everyone here loves squirrels! We'll sell a million of these as kits! They are soooooo cute!"

A year later, the squirrel had made just as much progress as the penguin.

Now that the penguin was done, however, I felt motivated. Home I went, to knit a squirrel. It started out much like the penguin:


There was the cute little tummy!



I thought it was starting to look kind of quizzical as I knit around on its little head:


But as I kept going, it took on a rather disturbing, lifeless look:

(Please forgive product placement. I swear I am getting no royalties from Sony.)

And by the time it had a tail, it looked .... well .... like this:


Dinner anyone? I'm knitting stew tonight.

*****

Postscript: I did feel a little uncomfortable shooting pictures of a dead, knitted-animal squirrel as cars drove by. Especially since I kept picking up the squirrel and moving it from one side of the street to the other, to get the lighting and the angles the way I wanted them. The bottom line is, I'm not in the habit of picking up roadkill with my bare hands.

So whenever cars drove by as I moved the squirrel, I decided to distract them by waving hello! Hi, everyone!


It is a friendly neighborhood and a small town. They all waved back.

And I wondered if, after they had driven on, their brains started realizing what they had just seen.

*****

Finale: The squirrel looked way more perky after it was felted, dried, and stuffed.

Don't cross, cute little squirrel!