My next amigurumi project.

I LOVED "The Doubtful Guest" when I was a kid and would have loved to have had a toy of the main character (I vaguely remember that I might have made a small one out of felt, but if I did, I no longer have it).

I don't know when I started reading Edward Gorey but I do know it was because of my mother - she brought the book home from the library when I was perhaps 8 or 9 and let me look at it. (My mother has an odd sense of humor, I guess). She liked "The Bug Book" (or whatever that story was called - the one where the red and blue bugs ["who were houseproud" - they lived inside an empty glass jar] wind up squashing the big bully bug who comes and threatens them). When I got a little older and took French I tried to translate the French limericks he had in there (assuming they must be dirty...re-reading them as an adult I find they aren't, really, unless there are some idiomatic usages in there I am innocent of).

But I really loved "The Doubtful Guest." Part penguin, part wombat, part demon, part who-knows-what. I guess I liked the fact that he was cute and yet kind of creepy. (I've said it before - I think if "Goth" had been a recognizable option back when I was in high school, I probably would have flirted with being Goth. Or at least Perky-Goth.) So I have to make one of these as a nod to my inner child. (And besides...I think I have scraps of all the necessary yarns on hand. I'm going to use a charcoal grey - more in keeping, I think, with the woodcut like style of Gorey - rather than black but I do know I have white for his plimsolls and red and white for the scarf...)