Outgoing Igor thwap parcel

Phew, I've been so exhausted after last weeks marathon knit-and-posting session that despite having much to talk about this week I haven't managed to find the strength to type up a full blog post. Yesterday though I managed to get to to bed early AND do an hours meditation beforehand. Well, more like 45 minutes I think because at some point towards the end I was so relaxed that I fell asleep. Anyway, I am now feeling a bit more refreshed and able to deal with the strains of daily life so back to fun blog posts.
So the very first thing that I must show because I am still so proud if it that when I think about it it makes me little feet lift off of the floor is the Thcrapth toy that I knitted for my Igor thwap buddy. My parcel was a little bit less imaginative than the one I got. Most of the space was taken up by the balls of yarn that I dug out of my stash but I also put in a rubber spiders web, a spare plastic toe (I was all out of thumbs at the time of posting), a tin of safety pins, a little back of roving for needle felting and some kilt buckles (I just had to get them once I saw them in the shop) but my pièce de résistance just has to be Thcrapth. Thcrapth makes his appearance in the Discworld book 'Carpe Jugulum' and is described as 'appearing to be made mostly of slobber', hence the enourmous tongue.

Here he is folks. Thcrapth is made up of lots of different bits of dog- he's a sort of Frankenstein monster type pet but with a tendency to drool and get overexcited when he meets new people. He's the epitome of a Heinz 57 variety dog what with their quite literally being many different bits from different breeds in his make up.
The body is knitted as one piece in different colours and weight yarns with the stitches being added on afterwards along with the face and tongue. The ears, legs and tails (Thcrapth is supposed to have two tails btw it's not me going mad) were made separately and are attached with poppers to the body. I wrote up the pattern for him as well which includes three different kinds of ear and two different kinds of tail. The legs are all the same only you change the yarn to make them bigger and smaller and the stitch to make them smooth or nubbly. He's about 8" long in all so a fairly large sized toy but not so huge that he seems out sized. My favourite bit though was making some parts of him have long hair whilst others have short. I finally got to use my mini slicker brush that the best friend gave me ages ago to use on another toy (that is still languishing in my knitting basket half completed). Turns out that bamboo yarns produce a very short soft fur whilst acrylics give longer more tangled fur. That was a good experiment.