My friend bought herself a ‘grumpy frog’ which is like a hot water bottle cover roughly in the shape of a frog and stuffed with lavender. You can still find a photo of the product here, but it's sold out. Sadly she did not like the strong perfume and texture of the product, and got an allergic reaction so she had to return it and reported what had happened.
I immediately decided to use my one and only chenille yarn ball that I wrote about here to make her a replacement perfume-free frog !
I was not so concerned about the general shape of the frog design as it was mainly a bag. At the time I didn’t have proper square paper so I went to this website to print some ‘knitting square paper’ which they call knitting graph. This type of paper is characterised by not having squares but rectangles which apparently preserves proportions and prevents shape distortion because in knitting knit rows are more elongated (‘taller’) than the wrong side purl stitches.
I used this type of paper to visualise the shape of the frog and to make it symmetrical. This also allowed me to follow the shape more easily and to add changes as I went along.
As the frog design was symmetrical I folded the sheet of paper in half along the longest side as shown above.
Figure A showing half of the lower back section, and Figure B showing the front or whole body shape.
I then started filling in some of the little rectangles in black pencil how I thought I could make the feet and lower body section (figure A). I then just went on to produce the whole half of the body shape including the arm (figure B) and the eye sockets. Luckily I had a rubber as you can probably see all the rubbing I did.
The photo above shows you what the shape for figure A looked like once finished upside down.
I did two rows of purl one knit one and then stockinette stitch. As this was only a ‘prototype’ or a wooly sketch I probably added one or two rows in order to adjust the shape to what I thought looked better. To be honest It was hard to distinguish the stitches with this sort of yarn. Also normally the edges tend to curl in but with this thick yarn the shape remained fairly flat which I guess would help if I was making a blanket with it instead. You can see in the photo above both feet.
I used a safety pin to hold the stitches in one and then found another safety pin for the other foot. I didn’t cast off in case I had to unravel if I didn’t like this shape.
I’ll show you the final look of this grumpy frog tomorrow. Thank you for reading !