I'm still not done posting on the different items made over my long break.

Here is the third, final, and I think, most spectacular project from the "Taupe Mist" Vanna's Choice:



It is a crocheted version of Edward Gorey's "The Doubtful Guest" (an odd, penguin-like creature that invades a large Victorian household and does things like deposit pocketwatches in the pond for "safekeeping," tear the pages out of books, and collapse in fits of melancholy (unfortunately just outside the drawing-room door)).

(This WAS a free pattern I found via Ravelry but it seems to have since disappeared from there. (But a bit of hunting in my archives turns it up: it's apparently still in existence here))

I used the Vanna's Choice because (a) I had it close at hand and (b) I thought the sort of marled color might capture the sort of woodcut-like quality of some of Gorey's drawings.

I will say this is one of the complexities of 2-D being rendered into 3-D: I think the "nose" (or "beak" or what have you) should by rights be longer and droopier, but that's kind of hard to recreate in crochet, I guess.

The shoes sounded wildly complex but I found that by just trusting and following the pattern, they came out right. (The scarf is my own design, a bit different from what the original pattern author did. I did the narrower stripes because I hate weaving in millions of ends, and I was able to just carry the unused color this way. As it turned out, I like the way the scarf looks better than the original. And it seems like it drapes better.)

Here's a better photo with the scarf:



I think I've mentioned before that I read parts of Amphigorey as a child (yes, I was a strange child). For some reason, I loved the character of the Doubtful Guest - I didn't really see his more sinister sides; he was more like an odd pet that showed up and did funny things. (Of course, I'd be annoyed if I had a real-life one; I'd have to lock up all my books).

I remember making a small toy form of this creature as a child, using an old dark-grey glove: I cut it up and used the fingers for the head and arms and made the body out of the palm section.

(Another person's remembrance of The Doubtful Guest, with a small photo of the cover of the stand-alone book extracting the story from Amphigorey)

I am not sure why the creature is funny and appealing; I suppose it had something to do with the illogicality of its actions and the fact that it got away with them. As a child, I frequently wished I could "get away with" more than I did, but having "proven" myself capable of logic on a number of occasions when it benefitted me to, my parents wouldn't let me get away with some of the illogical kid things I might have otherwise. I think maybe the slightly anarchic quality of the Guest appealed to me, the fact that he did what he darn well pleased and no one could really do much about it (either he did not understand human speech, did not speak the language of the householders, or, perhaps, like snakes are, was deaf)

Another odd but appealing thing was the fact that the creature wore a scarf (at least until he had adjusted to life indoors) and plimsolls (not unlike Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars, but I think "plimsoll" is a more fitting term here).

Everything about the creature was odd and didn't quite fit. And I think that's why I liked him. (I don't know whether it says anything psychologically about the fact that I usually felt like I "didn't quite fit" among my peer-group, at least until I got to high school)

I suspect also I imagined it as having a certain kinship with the Tove Jansson creatures - the Moomins and such - which I was madly fond of as a child.

(And it's funny that I usually refer to it as a "he;" everywhere in Gorey's story it's just "it" and as the commenter I linked to points out, it's apparently the only one of its species, so gender would not be an issue...)

The 'Guest is ironically enough quite cuddly and nice. It (he?) turned out larger than I expected, nearly a foot tall, and required the purchase of a second skein of the yarn (thank goodness one of the shops in my parents' town had it; I had bought it down here, used some for the manatee and some for the planarian, and when I started making this creature I thought I'd have enough - I very nearly unraveled the planarian just to have enough to finish this).