Nautali

These are fun toys, made from the Knitty pattern "Nautie."

This first was made with scraps of Artful Yarns' silk and cotton Fable, left over from making some awesome thigh-high socks.

The eyes are made from some stone beads, held in place by wires.

This one went to a sweetheart, and was so much fun to make that its twin went to my dad.






This guy has a Noro wool shell and a face of some unidentified orange and yellow twist yarn.

Eyes are, again, beads and wire.

This fellow went to a "fellow" blogger, in return for a gloriously beautiful crocheted bracelet.

The thing that I dig the most about this pattern is that the structural magic happens as you go; that is, the shell curls because you knit it that way, picking up a stitch from way-back-when and knitting it together with a live stitch. These guys are exciting, fun, and oh-so-ADORABLE! They drove me a little crazy, though, because I kept wondering what the formula would be for the perfect (i.e. leaves the circular cross-section undistorted) rate of increase would be, and whether it would be easy/possible to knit a 3D version of the Golden Spiral using this method.