Rita Raccoon and a Book Review

The Knitted Odd-bod Bunch book by Donna Wilson was a complete random/impulse purchase, a testament to store placement and appealing cover photos, I saw it and had to have it. I love the characters in the book. They are quite a quick knit and a good way to practice some more adventurous techniques like lots or increasing and decreasing, short rows, striping and intarsia without the commitment of a huge project. The photos really make this book and there is a short paragraph about each character that really brings them to life.

You should note that there are a few typos/mistakes in the book, but careful reading will easily help you catch these. Several of the characters are very similar in design, so it seemed more like 20 pattern with variation, but the styling of the book helped me over look this fact. My biggest complaint is that there is a lot of sewing, really a lot and I am awful at sewing things together! Now this is not the author’s fault, it is all me…anyway beware of the seaming.

To sum it up I like this book, the photos and characters are great! I wish there was less sewing and after reading through everything I realized that a lot of the patterns are just variations of each other. However, it makes me feel confident that I could vary/alter the patterns even more to come up with my own unique creations. And since I bought the book I needed to try out some of the patterns. I decided that I wanted to make the whole squirrel/fox/raccoon family, I do wish the the sets of animals were grouped together instead of spaced throughout the book, but since they are all pretty similar (as I mentioned) I guess that it makes the book seem to have more variety to space them out. This is Rita Raccoon the Mom of the family. I did make her tail slightly different from the pattern for personal design reasons (I’m making a matching family and I needed her to have a mostly dark tail). I used Peaches and Cream cotton yarn (no wool for us) and size US 5 needles. I had a really hard time embroidering her eyes (I’m still not happy with them), I think I need to use a heavier yarn and, as I mentioned I hated sewing her together. I have Rill Raccoon-Fox and Bad Ralf, the sons, knitted just waiting to be sewn together and embroidered. Oh I dread the sewing, I finished knitting them over a month ago and the pieces are just laying in the bottom of my knitting basket.

I would also like to make the cats from this book, but I’m going to have to get better at the sewing. Let me know if you have any tips or if you would like to volunteer to sew my knitting projects together for me, I'll take either :)