Owl Always Love You

A couple weeks ago I posted about one of my newest patterns: Fauxy the Fox. Isn’t she just adorable? You can find the pattern in my Etsy shop if you are interested. But, I wanted to make a whole collection of woodland-y animals. I’ve heard that collections sell really well. When my mother-in-law requested an owl to gift to someone else, I knew what creature was coming next!

As always, the first thing I did was basic research. What does a real owl look like, and how can I cutesify it to be a similar style to match my fox? I found my inspiration pretty quickly and then set off to make my own. Four times. That’s how long it took before I realized I wasn’t gonna be able to make my own. The first one was *special*. No matter how many times I redid the eyes, they always looked off somehow. The second one was top-heavy. I just could not figure out how to fix it. The third one was lumpy and awkward, and not even worth trying to fix. I just didn’t like the fourth one…it might’ve been fine, Just not what I was aiming for. Ho hum. Oh well. Back to do more research.

I came across this gorgeous pattern from Skopa Och Inreda, which I guess is Swedish for Create and Decoration. It was a bit challenging for me to figure out, since the whole blog is written in not English, but straight-forward enough that I could figure it out ok with some google translate.

For example…V 7: at the beginning of each row skip understood the mesh so that the work reduces a mesh width of each row 15, 14, 13 and so on until there are only three stitches. (Each row ends as usual with an air mesh). Of course, that makes no sense. But my smartie brain was able to figure out that she is talking about ROW 7: at the beginning of each row, skip one stitch (or sc2tog, which is what I did) so that the width reduces by one stitch for each row until there are only three stitches left. Each row ends with a ch 1.
So, if you can get past the linguistics and peculiar word translations, it is a beautiful pattern and well-worth your time. My other complaint, though, is how large the owl ended up being. It is hard to tell from the pictures provided on the blog, but it is HUGE! There are some instructions for making the owl smaller (which I will be following when I make this again), but it was an unfamiliar pattern so I didn’t want to further confuse and frustrate myself. Overall, I think this owl pattern is adorable, I just wouldn’t recommend it to the American beginner crochet artist.