Blue Whale

I got an email from a friend, T, yesterday asking me to knit a whale for another friend, P, as an inside joke for P's birthday. In my mind-melting-panicked-dissertation-writing haste I immediately replied, "No, there's not enough time." If you're a regular reader or know me in person, you may have guessed I don't have much love for my dissertation. "Quit your whining," you're probably thinking. But no, when I say I don't have much love I mean, I stuck it out this far because I was stupid; and I'm only still in it because I'm SO close to finishing it would be a shame not to. As soon as I get the degree I'm fleeing research and never looking back. I don't want to say hate, (queue the sentimental music) because hate is such a strong word. But actually, I do see the value in the work. I just don't want to be the one doing it. I want to be the one encouraging others to do this work and helping them develop the skills to do it well...and have a better experience than I had.

But I digress. After taking a break, all I could think about was this whale, how it would be a cool challenge, how I could use all the techniques in my arsenal, which yarn I should use, how big it would be. And the more I thought about it the more I decided this was totally do-able. After all I've been making balls for the Christmas Tree and for the dog for a while now and they only take one to 4 hours depending on their size.

Christmas Ornaments for 2012 - the one on the left and last two on the right each took 1 hour to knit, are felted, and will have more embellishments added via needle felting when Partner and I finally have some free time. The one in the middle too 4 hours, the second to the left took about 3 hours, but it was made from several pieces each about one yard long while I was visiting my in-laws.

Besides my Mother-In-Law recently raided her sister's yarn stash for me and picked up some cool yarns that I wouldn't normally choose. Like this:

It's totally beautiful yarn, with three textures with different shininess as you knit. And Mother-In-Law got me 14 balls of this beauty. But I gotta be honest. I'm not going to make a sweater from it. I don't want to wear polyamid, so I'm not going to make it for others to wear. Maybe, I thought,  it would make a pretty whale. And if not I have lots to experiment with.

So I emailed T back telling her I thought I had a pattern in my head and it would take 4-6 hours to make. 

And then it took all the will power I had not to start immediately. Instead I went back to making figures for my second chapter of my dissertation for another four hours. I thought I could hold off until the weekend. Partner and I even went out and had a romantic dinner with great conversation. And then we got home and realized we were too full to do anything but sit around and moan about how full we were. So I grabbed my US 3s and started playing around. 

Three hours later (after Partner had been asleep for 2.5 hours) I had this:

I must say, I felt much more calm after making it; ready (almost) to tacke the rest of my dissertation. I think the final touch will be adding some eyes where the first texture switches to the second. But I gotta leave something for T to do...

And I ended up liking it a lot. So after making another Blue Whale I'll probably write up the pattern and post it here.  Hopefully it won't take me too long, given that actual dissertation writing needs to happen and I'm still planning on knitting Christmas gifts. But hopefully, I can be more vague about this timeline than I have been for just about everything else in this post.