Wow, this UFOlympics thing is getting to be quite an eye-opener for me.

For one thing, I have started to realize just how little time I devote to knitting in the course of a standard week.  I mean to the actual act of pulling one loop of yarn through another.  Sure, I spend plenty of time writing about knitting, and teaching others about knitting, and working on my someday-I’ll-have-a-new-cool-website-about-knitting — but as for ACTUAL KNITTING, it seems to be an endangered species at my house.

This was brought home over the weekend, in particular.  I started working on UFO #2, the bunny slippers, on Friday evening.  OK, I have the slippers themselves made, so "all" I have to do is decorate them — add ears, eyes, noses, and tails.  Simple, no?

Even better, I already have a starting point for the ears:  this online pattern for a Mutant Bunny Hat.  As I have said before, no point in reinventing the wheel.  So on Friday eve, I started knitting a prototype of the ear to see just how big it was going to be, and how big it might be likely to be after felting.

I didn’t get it done Friday night, so I finished the prototype on Saturday morning.  And then I didn’t knit a single stitch for the next 36 hours or so.  Yikes!

Sunday night found me a little freaked out that my 4-day advantage, left over from UFO’s #0 and #1, had more-or-less evaporated. 

Well, onward and upward — or citius, altius, fortius, as the case may be.  I measured the ears on Hip and Hop (the original slippers), and used this data, plus my prototype, plus some wild guessing about what will happen in the washing machine, to decide that using the same yarn and needles as for the slippers has a decent chance of yielding a reasonably-sized ear — that is, an ear in line with the scale of the slippers, once felted.

So I ripped out the prototype ear, and started in earnest on ear #1.

The designer of the bunny hat used double-knitting for the ears, which works quite nicely - but as usual, I changed a couple of minor things.  (First of all, I didn’t knit a hat.)  Second, on my prototype I started out where she does with the ears, and realized my ears aren’t going to need quite as much "base" as hers have.  So I’m starting my real ears a few rows further on in the directions. 

Third, I changed the ribbing on the edges to be symmetrical.  It’s not a terribly obvious thing, but the ribbing on either side of the ear is written as "K1, P1, K1, P1" which means that it’s not a mirror image, and on one side of the ear you have a pink K st next to the lining, and on the other side of the ear you have a pink P st next to the lining.  YES, I know these are going to be felted.  That’s why I didn’t reknit ear #1.  But you may be able to see that the pink edges on the ear on the left are a bit lopsided, while those on the ear on the right are more balanced.

Thus, ear #2, and all subsequent ears, will have this minor upgrade.

Finally, I had to write out the directions row-by-row, because I kept getting lost and it took me 2 hours on Sunday night to knit ear #1.  After writing it out, it took me 1 hour on Monday night to knit ear #2.  With any luck, ear #3 and ear #4 will be completed tonight.

Which brings me to the crapshoot part of the whole thing.

After knitting the prototype ear and real ear #1, it occurred to me that the SMART thing to do would be to embellish ear #1 with the fur and felt it, to see if it comes out OK.  Then if all is well, proceed with ears #2-4 — or if not, re-engineer the ears.

However, I just don’t have that kind of time.  So, I decided to go whole hog and knit all 4 ears, and hope for the best.  If you’ve seen some of my other felted works, you may realize just how foolhardy this is on my part – but what else could I do?

So, watch this space for updates and wish me luck!