Wool-tastic!

A few weeks back, Imogene and I checked out Wool-tastic! at the National Museum of Scotland. Embarrassingly, after 8 years of living in Scotland, I'd never actually been to the museum, so it was a great afternoon for me on two counts, I finally got to see Dolly the sheep (who incidentally was post-mortemed by one of my old lecturers!).



The idea of the afternoon was to encourage the general public to engage with natural fibres and learn about wool, knitting and the history of the craft. The set up was lovely, lots of knitted armchairs and beanbags, plus an amazing tree covered in knitted leaves. There were loads of kids playing with wool, making pom-poms or learning to knit, it was lovely to see. Imo and I decided to make the deceptively 'easy' Knit A Rabbit From A Square. Ohemgee, it was awful. We were there for 3 hours, long enough for several of the helpers to comment on how long we'd been slaving away at our tiny little bunnies. Granted, Imo was teaching her boyfriend how to knit (kudos to him, there's no way I would have got Andrew anywhere near this event!) at the same time, but still, it took me the full 3 hours and I wasn't teaching anyone anything.



Basically you knit a square, then sew up the corners to make the legs and sew 2 rings to form the head and tail. It took me AGES to work out how to do the head, everything I did ended up with the head merging with the legs, like the rabbit had antennapedia. Not cool. I eventually gave up attempting to do the tail and instead made the tiniest little pom pom instead, which I actually think worked rather well.



Imogene was not best pleased with hers, I rescued him from a fate in the bin and, along with mine, will be making them into finger puppets for my friends' babies. I'm reasonably pleased with mine (the grey) but for the amount of time and effort put in, totally not worth it. The event was lovely though and definitely a nice way to while away a Saturday afternoon.



Incidentally - is anyone else having issues with Photobucket?  Mine doesn't seem to be updating the size of my images after I've resized them, they still come out far too big when I copy them into a blog post, so you lose half of it over the edge.  It's really annoying, I'm thinking of changing to another host, anyone got any suggestions?  Preferably for free sites...!