First of all:


Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!


That is for Lynn, who thinks LOLcats don't "speak" correctly, given how cats "should" speak were they able to.

Second: weekend plans.

I feel the need to make more amigurumi or knitted critters. Part of it is because I saw a link to this Etsy seller yesterday, and wanted her humpback whale, beluga, and narwhal patterns.

(I think I'm going to make the beluga first).

I've always liked unusual animals. Bears and bunnies and kitties are nice, but there's something that grabs my attention more with the unusual - particularly the more realistic - animal patterns.

I think the fondness for the unusual animal goes back to my childhood days, when one of my favorite types of toys (I KNOW I've written about this before) were those little plastic zoo animals - they usually weren't much bigger than an inch or two each, and you could buy whole bags of them at places like Kresge's. They were great toys because you could play with them in the sandbox, or you could wash them off and play with them indoors (carpet = grass in a grassland, chair legs = trees). You could tuck one or two in a pocket if you were having to go somewhere scary (like the dentist's) for a sort of reminder-of-home kind of comfort.

I had a little zoo animal set and one of my favorites out of it was the little pangolin. (I suspect one could make a pretty nice pangolin using a shell stitch or something for the scales). I also liked the various marsupials, because they always seemed kind of like the underdogs of the animal world. (Well, actually - when marsupials wind up competing with placentals, they often ARE the underdogs...see what's going on in Australia with some of the introduced placental species of mammals).

But I never thought much about marine animals (aside from having a copy of William Steig's "Amos and Boris" - which featured a whale - when I was a kid). But those ami's are cute, especially the Beluga. (But I also kind of have a soft spot for the narwhal - there may have been a book I read as a kid that had a narwhal in it, I don't know).

WHY the unusual animals? Maybe it was just because I was a weird kid. Maybe it was because they seemed to be to be "less popular" than the kittens/bunnies/puppies/chicks and so, as a fellow non-popular, I sympathized with them. Or maybe it was some kind of early form of geek cachet, sort of "my favorite animal is one YOU'VE never heard of."

I don't know. But I do tend to be drawn to the more unusual animal patterns.