I finished the Baby Snow Dragon last night



He is a lot smaller than you might expect from the photograph with the pattern...you can see the books there for scale.

I left off the "eye capsules" that the pattern called for - I crocheted them up but they came out too big and they looked out of proportion. I think he is cuter without them anyway.

I named him Milou. (Some may get the rather weak linguistic joke there)

Here's another picture:



The slightly crooked smile was kind of an afterthought - originally I was not going to do a mouth but as I was preparing to tie off the embroidery floss I kind of tried stretching it across the face and I liked the effect.

(As I said before: sometimes it seems certain toys "want" their features to be a certain way, and no matter what you do, they come out that way. It is better not to force the issue.)

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I also started something new last night. I had the idea for a pair of socks rattling around in my head - in the first volume of the big Vogue stitch treasury there's a stitch they call "horseshoe crab" (it's hard to tell from the photo just how much it looks like them). But I decided I wanted a pair of "horseshoe crab" socks. (I have no actual real experience with horseshoe crabs; I never lived on the East Coast or anything like that. But I think horseshoe crabs are cool). I found some odd-colored green yarn in my stash (it was an Elann purchase, back after Stahl got sold out to...well, whoever they got sold out to...and a lot of the colors of Socka were being discontinued). Elann called the color "pea soup" and for quite a while after ordering it I felt like it was kind of a "mistake yarn" - not a good color, ugly, what will I do with this? I can't even give it away - kind of feeling.

But last night, I realized that the actual color wasn't really "pea soup." It was "horseshoe crab." And then the yarn, you know? It almost started to glow a little, and the color looked much prettier to me, and when I started to knit it up, I realized - hey, this yarn is actually kind of nice. I like the color!

So I guess the yarn was destined to become horseshoe crab socks, I just didn't know it when I bought it.

(And - as always - if the pattern works out well I'll post a version here. Just in case anyone else has some odd, greyish-greenish-yellowish yarn that they want to turn into a pair of horseshoe crab socks).