WIP Wednesday: Mysteriousness

After my Friday post when I discovered Barbara Prime animal patterns, I learned that she was hosting a Mystery Knit-Along! 

Technically speaking the knit-along started on February 28th, but this is a 6 week long affair so I knew I would be able to catch up. I've only ever participated in FreshStitches crochet-alongs before, so it's fun to branch out a bit and join this one with Fuzzy Mitten. We were given color recommendations, but ultimately the choice is your own. I dug in my stash and found what I needed -

Barbara said that the body color should be brown with a hint of rust - she also let on that the color she is using (in the first pic above) is a little bit too orangey for the animal's natural color. So, when I saw my skein of Vanna's Choice in Toffee I knew it would be perfect. I'm pairing it with Vanna's Choice in Beige for the contrast on the body. Then the cardigan called for sock yarn - now I've really never done much with sock yarn that wasn't a shawl, so I only have a few skeins in my stash. I didn't want to use any that were intended for actual socks because I didn't want to come up short in the end (man would that suck). In the end that narrowed my choices to baby blue, baby green, or baby pink. I went with the blue and now it looks like I'm copying Barbara's colors exactly, lol. Oh well.

Since I'm starting so late in the game, I was able to browse through what others have made already for the knit-along and I saw a few who jazzed up their sweaters with stripes. I thought that was a super cute idea - so I basically made the pattern harder on myself, lol. The white is Aunt Lydia's Iced Bamboo in Icicle and it has just a smidge of sparkle to it. The blue is Red Heart Pompadour.

 I think I will be making another slight change to the pattern. The pattern has you make the purl side of the cardigan the outside so you can see this cool yoke detail. THat's great in theory, but my purl sides never look very great to me. Maybe it's just personal preference - I'm not a big garter stitch fan either.

See? Kind of uneven and bumpy, right? This would drive me crazy every time I looked at it. Happily, you can just flip it inside out and you have this:

Ah, nice smooth stockinette stitch, how I love you. The more I look at it this way, the better I like it. So I think this will be the outside for my animal. I just finished the cardigan last night (clues 1 and 2 of the mystery), and now I just have to block, weave in the ends, and find 3 super tiny buttons for it. The next clue has the arms and legs! I'm really excited to find out what I'm making, lol. I have my suspicions, but I don't want to ruin it for anyone so I won't say.

The knit-along is only $2.50 and it's still got several more weeks to go, so if you'd like to join me go here to get the pattern and get knitting :)

That's it for me this week :) Head over to Tami's Amis' Blog to see what others are making :)