woodins

When I first saw the Woodins pattern on Knitty, I knew I had to knit it (I find little wood spirits totally captivating). But naturally, I improvised with the pattern and ended up with something slightly different.

I followed the pattern for the woodins themselves pretty closely, just changing yarns (Lamb's Pride Worsted) and needle size (3's - accidentally) and omitting the leaf tail. It was with the log that I went in a different direction.

The pattern calls for you to knit a long cylinder which you felt, fold in half, and stuff. I didn't have enough bark-like wool for the double layers, and anyways, I thought I could simplify by knitting just one stiff layer of thick, scratchy wool (Bartlett's, I think). I knit a shorter cylinder, improvising for the bark pattern, hole, and twig. The log that resulted was aesthetically pleasing but functionally a failure: it wasn't stiff enough to maintain the cylindrical shape. Ah-ha, that's why she has you knit two layers and put stuffing between them!

Amey recommended that I line it with plastic canvas to give it shape, and this is how I ended up salvaging the log. I cut a piece of plastic canvas to fit, covered it with brown fabric, and stitched it in. It took me f-o-r-e-v-e-r because my sewing skills are so rudimentary (so much for saving myself time by only knitting one layer). But I think it came out well in the end.

I'm sending it to a Finnish friend who was my roommate at my Welsh boarding school. We've only been in sporadic touch over the last ten years. But she just had a baby, and I wanted to make something special for her. The woodins pattern seemed like an appropriate gift to celebrate our two years in what was truly a magical, ancient-feeling, wooded place.