My (tiny) pony

This is the first of the things I made over break. I remembered this time to bring the book (Crocheted Toys by Claire Garland). I had planned to do this over Christmas, carried the yarn up there with me...and forgot the book at home.

So I made the pony this time. It was a lot fiddlier to do than I anticipated, and also came out smaller. I used dk weight yarn as specified in the pattern (but did go down a hook size; I was concerned that an H hook - as specified - would make too loose a fabric and the stuffing would show through). Also, the pony came out a lot skinnier - more of a horse body shape than a colt - than the one pictured, but again, that might be the smaller hook and tighter tension.



I was never really a horse-crazy kid: for one thing, I grew up in town and only the "rich" kids had access to horses. And also, I admit, horses scared me just a little; I had read in a book we had ("Our animal friends at Maple Hill Farm" by the Provensons, which is a lovely book for a child who likes animals or is interested in farms) that you had to be careful around horses because they could inadvertently step on your feet - because they couldn't always see where you had your feet. Also, they were so big, compared to the animals I knew. (Then again, I was also afraid of a German Shepard on our street, but that was partly because he barked).

I was also just a bit too old for the first incarnation of the My Little Ponies craze. (Actually, a lot of the cool "popular" toys of the late 70s/early 80s came out just as I was a "bit too old" for them. The 1970s were, by and large, not a very good era for fun toys, IMHO. Other than Lego bricks and the Fisher-Price little people stuff...it was kind of a desert. I suppose that's another way Gen X got shafted; the oil embargoes raising the price of plastics, and also the fact that there were fewer of us than there were of the baby boomers, led to less innovation in toys. Oh, I guess there was Barbie in the 1970s, but I never found Barbie all that interesting...she seemed to me like the prissy girl who was afraid to DO anything because she'd muss her hair or get her clothes dirty. I was more interested in climbing trees and poking mud with sticks, so I mainly played with small plastic zoo animals (which could be taken outside and washed off if they got dirty) or with stuffed toy animals).

Come to think of it, if My Little Ponies had come out when I was 7 or 8, I might have gone for them. I don't know. Or I might have found them too cutesy and unrealistic. I had a few Breyer-type horses and generally enjoyed playing with them, though mainly it was pretending they were wild horses running out on the prairie than show horses getting saddled up to do jumps and things.

I probably would have liked a toy horse like this when I was a child, though.



I decided to name her Lavandula, kind of in the same vein as the unicorn I made (knitted, but also from a Claire Garland pattern) that I named Eglantine.

One of my favorite things about her horse/unicorn patterns - which, sadly, doesn't show up as well on Lavandula - is the knobby knees that are made by increasing and then decreasing.

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Here is a photo of the new shoes. They're certainly well-made (by the SAS company, probably one of the few companies left that makes their shoes in the U.S.) but are perhaps a bit plain compared to some of the shoes out there.



Though really, they're not so bad. I could even wear them with dressy slacks if I wanted (and if I owned any really "dressy" slacks; I don't, at this point).



They have a low heel on them. Perfectly flat shoes don't seem to suit my feet any more (or perhaps flat shoes have less padding, and it's the effect of standing on tile-over-concrete floors for hours that makes my knees hurt). But I'm guessing more than 2" or so on heels, I just can't do, lest I "destroy" my ankles. (These shoes have about a 1" heel.) And I do still have a good pair of bone-colored sandals for the little summer dresses I wear.

(I went clothes shopping on break, too. I was disappointed, though. I really, really wanted to find one or two more pretty little summery dresses - because I do think one of the perks of being female, and being in a more "creative" field where you can dress pretty much as you please, is being able to wear pretty, preferably flowered, dresses in the summer. But nowhere I looked had them. Well, the J. Peterman catalog did - they had a cute tucked-front dress and what they called the "1947 dress" (based on the New Look silhouette, and believe me, I saw that dress and went, "WANT.") But J. Peterman is VERY expensive compared to my usual clothing budget, and also I'm unsure of their sizing...that's always a problem with mail-ordering clothes. (And neither of the colors of the 1947 dress would have been ideal for me - there was a darkish teal and also a brick-and-teal stripe, and I'd really rather have the dress in a nice clear blue, or blue-and-white print, or some kind of small floral)

I don't know. I might still break down and buy another Deva Lifewear dress. They're more hippieish than the chic J. Peterman styles, but I can buy three or four Deva Lifewear dresses for the cost of one J. Peterman. And I know they're well-made, and I know what size fits me in them.

The real solution would be to sew my own, because I could have just what I wanted, but the fitting issue always stymies me - I like my clothes to fit well, and when I lived with my parents, fitting a pattern was easy - I had my mom to help me try it out and also to offer pointers on what to do where (for example: I almost always had to make the sleeves wider. A lot of patterns are made for women with stick-insect arms, it seems). Perhaps someday I'll break down and get a dress form that is made to my size (or make one; there's a method you can use with duct tape, but then again, you need to have a willing accomplice or two to help) and I could fit onto that. (Or I could just break down and make muslins of everything I wanted to sew to try out the fitting...)