Knit Your Own Sleepy Owl Kit

Or wide awake owl..

Another kit this week, this time from my long-standing favourites The Little Knit Kit Company. They have just launched this super cute owl kit and, given how rewarding I'd found their previous kits, I was keen to try it.

The kit cost £15 and came with everything to make the owl - yarn, stuffing, felt, thread and plastic needle. I passed on the knitting needles as I have just strimmed my vast collection down to a reasonable number of pairs per size.

Like many of the other Little Knit Kit Company designs, the owl is knitted entirely in garter stitch on 4mm needles using a chunky yarn to give a nice firm fabric. What was intriguing this time was the use of stripes and multiple colour changes. At first, I was tempted to try and join in all the colours without knotting and weave in the ends to show how clever I was, but then I realised that was kind of dum and followed the pattern. This advocated the far more sensible approach of joining the new colour in with a knot and then simply hiding the ends inside the toy.

To make the owl's body, you make two identical pieces and I'm proud to say that mine actually match stripe for stripe. I then back stitched the sides of the body together, hiding all the ends and then mattress stitched the top.

To create a more owl-like shape, I pulled the ears out and also stretched the lower half of the fabric a little. I used the toy filling provided to stuff the owl and also added a bag of plastic pellets to weight the bottom and enable the owl to stand up on his own a little better. I then closed the bottom of the owl with mattress stitch.

The owl's wings are simple garter stitch rectangles that you gather at the end to create some shape and then stitch onto the body.

As I'm still on a bit of a crochet jag, I decided to substitute the sleepy felt eyes that came with the kit for some safety eyes surrounded by a white crochet ring.

Idiotically, I mislaid the templates for the beak and feet, so cut them freehand from felt and glued them on with some Tacky Glue.

And there he is, so simple to knit yet a really nice finished design with (in my view anyway), quite a sophisticated vintage look.

Melx