Dusting off the neglect - with cute undies!

Hi! My name is Dave, maybe.

Finally I have some finished projects to detail. This includes items that are gifts for my sister. Unfortunately two in progress gifts started at earlier times were not finished in time to ship. Oh well. I may debate whether or not to upload the pics at this time. It's Friday now and her birthday is Sunday. With luck her package will arrive on Saturday. That's not a lot of time there to spoil a surprise I suppose. I won't feel the least bit concerned if she opens her box on Saturday. I suppose if she snoops around and sees pics and descriptions here in the meantime she'll either have a short period of happy expectation waiting for her box to arrive or she'll avoid any additional time waiting to be disappointed or unimpressed. Let's move on!

pupils centered

Since I am drawn to quirky personalities and especially quirky patterns with personality (maybe that answers a question if my good friend, Jim, is subscribed to updates) I adore many of the characters depicted in KnitWit: 20 Projects for Beginners and Seasoned Knitters by Katie Boyette. Per my sister's request I had already knit her a sock monster along with several monster sized socks for it to wear. So it seems that an underwear monster is the next thing. If I'd had more time I might have made one or two more monsters, each wearing a different article of clothing.

small eye pinned slightly lower

I found myself torn between aligning the underwear monster's eyes or shifting them. Since Dave (the pattern monster) is shown at an angle to the page I'd gotten used to the sight of him with one eye lower than the other. When I pinned them on with the centers at the same height he just didn't look as cute to me. So I took pictures of him with the eyes pinned each way to decide. Admittedly, the difference is very small anyway.




I also pondered whether or not it was better to sew the eyes on with the white eye color or with the body color. I did the large eye first and used white but felt that the body color would have been a better choice. 

body color yarn attaches

white yarn to attach

one white, one body color

So then I started sewing on the smaller eye with the body color. I think I ended up pulling the yarn tail between the edge of the eye and the stitches attaching it to cover the edge of the eye. Then when I finished the small eye I fished the yarn back to the larger eye and duplicate stitched the body color over the stitches attaching the eye to the body. In the end I concluded that it really didn't matter either way. But originally I'd been very upset by the white attaching stitches seeming like they were in the plane of the body. Because the eyes are so very bulbous that troubled me; there's a chance that tension might have made a difference, but I just focused on whether one color made more sense than the other.