Knitting small stuffed animals seems to be my go to summer project. Remember that cute frog from last year? This year designer Claire Garland came out with a bat pattern. You know that one went straight to the top of my queue!
The pattern called for size 0 needles and fingering weight yarn. The smallest needle I have is a size 2 so I picked out some sport weight yarn knowing I could still knit the pattern, but that my bat would just be a little bigger.
The pattern was well written and fun and knit up easily. When I got to the part where I needed to cut out the felt wings I realized that my bigger bat was not going to fit those smaller wings so I drew a bigger design.
Since I was drawing a new wing pattern anyway, I changed a couple of elements. First, since mine was now a big brown bat, I edited the wing design to more closely match that species. I also thought it would be cute if the wings would fold around the body so the bat could go to sleep and changed the placement just a bit so they would tuck cleanly under her face.
I didn't have any matching brown felt so I took a piece of gray and dyed it myself. For as "anti-colorful" as I am, I really do like to play with making colors for special projects. Instead of stitching the bat's "fingers" as folds in the felt, I used a tiny crochet hook and made crochet chains that I then needle felted and stitched them into the wings.
One last thing I tweaked was to insert short pipe cleaners into the toes. I did that with a needle and just threaded them down through the foot and out the toes. I left them sticking out a bit on the ends, folding them up behind the toes when she's awake and ready to fly and unfolding them when she's ready to go to sleep so they can securely wrap around a branch or a loom rod :-).
The next fun part was trying to figure out how to get the best pictures of her. I started out in the Wool House, but that's one of the worst places to try to get accurate pictures of dark yarns...so I moved outside...where it's also really hard to get pictures of dark yarns if the sun is still shining, even if you move into the shade...so I made one last effort last night after the sun dropped below the horizon.
"Miss Bat?" (Now named Stellaluna :-)
"Yes?"
"I know it's a bit early yet, but I was wondering if you could fly about for a bit so I could take your picture."
"No problem. I'd be happy to!"
Bats really are pretty agreeable if you aren't yelling at them and trying to swat them with towels. Bats are very beneficial and, like so many other animals, are really struggling now. I love having bats in our barn and I encourage everyone to do what they can to help protect these hard workers.
I used the Rocky and Jared sons and daughters
Lamb Camp Legacy dark gray/brown yarn for the body. For the belly patch and the details around her ears I un-plied a strand of the medium gray and held it double with the dark brown.
The eyes are black glass and glued into the eye holes. I've never tried that before, but it seems to be working just fine. For the nose and mouth I took a short strand of the dark brown yarn and dyed it black. I didn't add any fangs or teeth because she wanted to be a smiling bat :-).
The felt, before and after. The felt is 100% wool I believe. If it's not, it's only a very small percentage of acrylic. It took the dye wonderfully. It did shrink a little, but I was prepared for that. Once it was dry I took a steam iron to it and it pressed into a luxurious fabric.
Auntie Reg found a perfect button in her button box. Not only is the size and color perfect, but if you can zoom in enough, the design looks very similar to the "spokes" of the bat's "fingers"! A little early evening sunlight shining through topped it all. We used velcro to fasten the wings/cloak so we didn't need to make a button hole.
As the barn bats started flying out last night, I set the little knitted bat out on the fence so she could watch them and she decided to stay out all night. I hope she had a fun out flying around with them
.Good morning, Miss Bat. Sleep well :-).
