Greta the Captivating Cat

Beyond the comfort zone... 

After last week's  easy-to-knit-but-pig-to sew-up project, I thought I'd try it the other way round. This is Greta the Captivating Cat, a PDF pattern from Rebecca Danger's Etsy shop. I love Rebecca's patterns, but having knitted one before, I also know they involve knitting almost exclusively in the round with picked up stitches and the like. The patterns are supposed to knitted with a combination of double pointed needles and magic loop, but given I still can't use DPNs, I knew I would have to do the whole lot with magic loop. The reward, though, would be minimal sewing up and a pleasingly seamless effect.

For the project, I chose Twilleys Freedom Purity Chunky in grey. The yarn is 85% wool and 15% alpaca and very good value at £3.79 per 50g ball (I ended up using two out of the three balls I purchased). The pattern allows you to use any weight of yarn with needles a couple of sizes smaller than recommended so I worked with 5mm needles and a 100cm cable from my brilliant Knit Pro rosewood interchangeable needles set.

To start with, I knitted each leg individually on the circular needles, which went pretty well. Then the tough part. You have to arrange both legs and four additional stitches onto the circular needles so you can pick the whole lot up to made a seamless join between the legs and the body. This took two attempts and a little botching but I got there in the end. The first few rounds of the body feel a bit tricky as you bring together the legs, but once I got going I couldn't stop and finished the body in record time.

The pattern suggested you should leave the seam at the top of the legs open for stuffing and close the head with three needle bind off, but I opted to close my bottom seam early as the yarn ends were bugging me and the gap wasn't that large for stuffing and inserting the safety eyes and nose. So, I stuffed the body and created the cat's face from the top of the head and then closed it with mattress stitch. The final step for the body was to sew on the little belly button, which is such a cute touch.

By this stage, all the hard work was really done, with just the appendages to go. I made the two ears on the circular needles and sewed them on (probably the messiest bit of the whole thing). I then produced two arms and, as per Rebecca's instructions, stuffed just the paws before attaching them. Unlike for the ears, I mattress stitched the arms closed at the top first, then sewed them on, which seemed neater than sewing them on open.

Finally, I made a circular tail. It's a bit shorter than the pattern as I was getting to the end of my second ball and didn't want to start a third for the sake of a few rounds. I think the tail looks long enough though?

The final flourish was to raid my considerable ribbon stash for kitty's neck bow. I finally settled on a cute paw print ribbon. Greta is also a tall cat, standing about 15 inches high.

I'm not sure this is a very girly cat but I'm mighty impressed with her and a little bit impressed with myself for managing to knit it. More Rebecca to come I think...

Melx