A couple of weeks ago I received an email from a friend of a friend who had attended a baby shower for our mutual friend. She liked the Noah's Ark play mat that I made for my friend. She is going to be a godmother for another friend's baby. She asked me to make a play mat similar to the Noah's Ark one but with a safari/jungle theme. I was excited because I had just done one of these for another friend. I had her check out my past blogs to get an idea of what it would look like. At first, she was not as happy with it as she was with the Noah's Ark one, but she still wanted it to have a safari/jungle appearance. She wasn't crazy about the arches, and she wanted to be able to hang it on the wall. After I told her that the arches are completely able to be detached and it can be hung on the wall, she agreed that it would be nice. She had wanted it to be completely knitted, but since she needs it before Sept., I could not get it completed by then.
I got to work right away on the project of course. I worked on the mat and the first two animals, last week. I started with the rhino first because I had not made one before. It took me almost eight hours to complete. Next, I did what turned out to be my easiest animal, the hippo. It only took me about six hours to do it. Since I did not have kids to babysit for the past three days, I spent that time knitting the final three animals. I spent twelve hours on Sat. and completed the monkey and started the zebra. Sun., I worked for eight hours and completed the zebra and did one body piece for the tiger. After another ten hours on Mon., I finally completed the tiger that for some reason seemed so much more difficult than it was when I made it before. I have to reduce the pattern for these safari/jungle animals by half. Sometimes, it is difficult to do it exactly because of stripe pattern, odd numbers, etc. Anyway, for some reason the body of the tiger seemed way too large, and the head was much too small. Also, the head looked like a football, instead of like a basketball the way the pattern appeared to look. Once again, I am so thankful that yarn is such a forgiving media with which to work. It is so easy to correct some of these problems without taking the whole thing out and starting over. Unfortunately, I have to do that more often than I would like. Anyway, here are the results. I sure hope Kelly is happy with the order. She is getting it at a real bargain price. I'm not making very much on this project, but I do like having something to work on. It is so much fun to create things like this.
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| This is the way the mat looks without the arches and the way it would look hanging on the wall. |
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| This is the completed project with the animals hanging from the arches. |
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| This is Marvelous Molly the Monkey. |
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| This is the final results of Terrific Timothy the Tiger. |
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| Handsome Harry the Hippo has a slightly crooked smile which adds to his character. |
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| Zippy Zelia the Zebra was fun to make. |
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| Romping Richy the Rhino was an interesting project to complete since it was my first rhino. |
I am still working on finding the best materials with which to make the arches. This time, I used the swim worms because they are the right consistency to be both flexible and stiff enough to bend and still be able to support the weight of the animals. They work fairly well, but they are slightly too short to be high enough to keep the animals off the mat, and they are sort of fat looking. I will continue to look for something that might work better for future mats of this nature.
I thank anyone who might be viewing my blog and hope to hear some comments from you if you are signing in. I really enjoy sharing my work with you.
