Sheep, Uteruses, and Ravelry

(If knitting talk makes your eyes glaze over, at least skim down to the uterus at the bottom. Or not. Depending on how creeped out you are at the possibilities here.)

I’ve been experimenting with various needle sizes, types of yarn and ways of assembling the Barbara Prime knit sheep pattern and I’ve been having fun with these. I plan to make others of her patterns, and can start now that I’ve received my massive yarn shipment I’ve been waiting for. Included in said shipment was stuffing, so I no longer have a mass of unstuffed sheep body parts on my living room table.

I’ve also made some changes to the original pattern, including a version I’ve started using dpn and also changing her K1 M1 notations to KFB, to get rid of the holes caused by the M1 method. (See small beige sheep below to see what I mean about the holes.) It looks much nicer! My favourite has to be the one made with the Wendy Origins yarn (the curly stuff). It’s a little tough to keep track and count the yarn on the needles, but on the upside, if you do make a mistake, it’s hard to see that too.

I am making great progress in my knitting techniques, and want to extend a huge thank you to those knitters out there that put such helpful tutorials on the web! I have such a huge resource available to me via the internet that my mom sure never had when she was starting out. One such resource is the website Ravelry.com It’s basically a facebook for knitters. Wow. Particularly helpful was a tutorial for the mattress stitch for toys.

Here’s the herd:

But while I’ve been surfing for knitting tutorials, I’ve come across the inexplicable. Yes, someone created a knitted womb. A KNITTED WOMB??? Yes.

Here’s the description of the item:

Human anatomy is pretty amazing, but not always pretty. My interest in anatomy coupled with the Blythe dolls phenomenon somehow combined in my imagination to produce a cute, cuddly uterus doll.

Of all the descriptions I’ve ever considered for uteri, the word cuddly just never came to mind.

I once saw a pattern for a brain, but even that didn’t see to compare with this one.

Seriously. WTF do you even do with that? I have my sheep next to a basket of yarn balls and they make some semblance of sense. But a uterus?

Honestly I do try not to judge other people too harshly, but this? Colour me boggled.