A Beaver for A Birthday- The Ultimate Free Gift

So a couple of months ago, my husband and I were bored and on Netflix, so we decided to watch this documentary on beavers. Hey, they're cute, fluffy when dry, and build crazy things. What better show for an engineer and his wife? So after this viewing, my husband became pseudo obsessed with beavers. Nothing major, he just makes frequent remarks about wanting to get one for a pet, though not as often as his remarks about wanting to get a bobcat, but that's another story.

So fast forward to this year, and I am killing time one night on Ravelry or Pinterest, or someother place with way too many choices and ideas than could ever be finished, and I found this beaver pattern.  It called to me, so I decided that I had to make it for my husband for his birthday. I started it on January 7th and figured that would give me plenty of time to get it done by May 1, his birthday. I originally planned on just working on it at my Friday Night Knitting gatherings, but between my daughter having dinner issues after Friday gymnastics, and general socializing, not much knitting was getting done.

Luckily, I am currently home most of the time, as my main employment is home based. So the beaver came out while he was at work, and wow, between its general small size, largish gauge and the fact that my daughter considers it playing as long as I talk for the toys, I was able to make some great progress.

As I was working, I found it odd that the pattern starts with the body, then you leave live stitches for the tail on waste yarn, and go back and pick-up stitches for the head. After a few more seconds of actually reading the pattern ahead of time, I soon saw that you stuff the head and body before knitting the tail, which explains the segmentation. I still don't understand, however, why you don't just start with the head and knit from end to end. Maybe the designer didn't think that a cast-on would be secure enough to hold the stuffing at the nose... Oh well.

So here we are, January 21, and I am on the tail. To be fair, it is going much more slowly than the rest, but I feel very comfortable with my progress.

So it's a free pattern, I used stash yarn, and I stuffed it with some of those fleeces I got for free. I guess I did spend money on the yarn at some point, but not recently, and since my husband is horrible to get gifts for, I figure this is as good as just about anything else.