New friend in the neigh-borhood: Clydesdale

Hello friends, fall has arrived to my corner of the world. I just finished a Clydesdale horse figure, a wonderful challenge from a pattern by Toota Toys. You can find Toota on LoveCrafts, Etsy, and Ravelry.

Toota has such a sensitive design aesthetic. The pattern details are so realistic. Many little girls fantasize about having their very own horse, and this one speaks to the child in me.

Nothing worth having is easy, though. One of the big challenges of making this beauty will be no surprise to fiber enthusiasts – the eyelash yarn, used for the horse’s feathering, is a bear to work with. This was my first time actually using eyelash yarn like this. I dove right in, because well, I really wanted this horse, and I have become a fearless fiber warrior woman. I may not have used an orthodox method to keep track of my stitches (see below), but the end result is more than satisfactory, and I learned a lot as I moved through the pattern. I may even be willing to make a second horse, at some point.

I’d been waiting for a long time to start making this figure, and my first big challenge was getting yarn. I waited mainly because the pattern called for a brand of yarn that is discontinued. I found a perfect substitute, on of all things, a Chinese shopping site called Temu. The yarn for the horse’s body had to be a fingering-weight velvet of an appropriate shade; it is thin yarn, and I had to hold between one and three strands of it together at different intervals of the pattern.

Adding to the complexity were to procure almond-shaped 8mm eyes (check); 3mm wire (also, check – I used 1.8mm garden wire that I doubled); at least four different hook sizes for making the figure’s different parts; and workable yarn for the mane and tail. The pattern recommended silk thread, but I became impatient trying to find the right kind, so I subbed in a bamboo-cotton yarn that has a crimped look I Iove.

In an above photo, you can see a close-up of an eyelash yarn hot mess, studded with plastic stitch markers. This madness was my method for keeping track of tiny stitches obscured by eyelash fiber clumps. For each leg’s feathering, there were six rounds using eyelash yarn. Each round had some number of increase and decrease stitches, which added another tier of difficulty (the increases/decreases formed the hocks and fetlocks). To be honest, I used more often my sense of touch than sight in this area. One of the legs I had to start all over before I got the hang of things.

All in all it was a joy to make, not in spite of but because of the challenge. Coincidentally, exactly five years ago today (Oct 18, 2020), I posted about another Toota make: a tractor! Check that one out here. The tractor found a home in Australia.

I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have too many irons in the fire. This week, I also finished a quick striped half-moon shawl using King Cole Riot yarn in shade 3349 Sea Breeze and a 5.00mm hook. It was a fun, mindless make as a foil to the challenges of the horse. The shawl has a subtle lettuce edge and looks cute with denim.

Soon I’ll share my yearly pumpkin make – this time, in an unconventional colorway. I’m also working on a large multi-colored cowl, and I just began a cardigan sweater that may take until after Thanksgiving to finish.

Thanks for checking in. Crafting has become one of my “escapes” in these distressing times, and I love having time to visit this quiet corner on the internet, but by no means is my head in the sand.

There’s a quote by Václav Havel—who led a nonviolent revolution in Czechoslovakia while living under a brutal regime:

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing, no matter how it turns out.”

I couldn’t be more certain about the vital importance of uplifting civic education, media literacy, justice, building inclusive narratives, and the need for the people to reclaim and protect our cherished institutions. The people should never allow freedoms to slip away that have been secured through generations of sacrifice. Democracy is an active pursuit, a daily choice, and worth all the effort to maintain, as hard as that is.

Be well and see you soon, with another make and some fall foliage from the Far East.