Elephant No. 313: Crocheted Wire

I've crocheted with wire before, although never into anything other than a square or a long line. Since I'm not great at crochet, I feared this might end up being a square that I then folded into an origami elephant or something, but I figured I'd at least try to make a three-dimensional elephant.

I've already covered the history of crocheting, and of wire, for this blog, so I'll just cover the activity as it unfolded.

I started by pulling out all the jewellery-weight wire I have. Because I went through a phase of making knitted wire brooches, I have several interesting colours. I ultimately settled on a turquoise/peacock blue for the elephant, and magenta and lime green for a scarf, all in a 30-gauge size.

I had no pattern for this, and I'm useless at writing things down as I go, so I can't really share the number of stitches and so forth. I'm also pretty useless at crocheting, althoughI like the technique for its ability to generate pretty much any shape you want—as long as no one looks too closely at how it was made. For my previous adventures in crocheting for this blog, you can look at my crocheted lace and crocheted wool. Feel free to laugh.

Using a 1.25 mm crochet hook, I started by making a circle until it seemed about as wide as I wanted the tiny little head. Once I'd reached the diameter I liked, I stopped enlarging it and began making it smaller again.

As I made this first circle smaller, I was also able to taper the shape into the beginnings of a trunk. From the little trunk base, I chained enough stitches for what looked like an acceptable length of trunk, then turned back from the tip and crocheted single crochet back towards the head, where I finished the shape and pulled the ends inside.

I turned my attention to the body next, making a sort of oval using a similar technique, albeit not tapered to the same extent. I left a small neck opening at the end of the body, and crocheted this onto the head.

I added legs next. To do this, I made a slip knot and attached the wire through the lower body. I chained a few stitches—seven for the front legs and five for the back. I then used single crochet to make my way back up to the body, where I stitched through the body once, then back down with single crochet, finishing off at the bottom. I made each leg individually using this technique.

I added a tail next by attaching wire with a slip stitch through the top of the elephant's back end, and simply chained a few stitches. At the end of the tail, I left a small bit of wire.

For the ears, I chained three stitches through the head on each side, going around these stitches on both sides until I liked the shape, adding fewer stitches at the base of the ear. I also stitched through the head each time I went around.

To give the elephant a little scarf, I chained about twenty stitches in magenta and lime green, making two separate strands that I then twisted together. To finish off, I poked and squeezed the elephant into shape, then added the scarf and shaped it.

It took me two hours to make the elephant, but I'm quite happy with this little guy. He's not a work of art, but as a tiny little blue elephant, I think he's pretty cute.

Elephant Lore of the Day
Although today's elephant lore is about one of the most famous elephants in history, I've avoided writing about it because it's such a heartbreaking story.

Mary was a five-tonne Asian elephant who performed in the Sparks World Famous Shows circus. In September 1916, the circus was in Kingsport, Tennessee, and took on a few locals as temporary circus hands. A hotel worker named Red Eldridge was among them—hired as an assistant elephant trainer, despite a complete lack of experience.

On the evening of September 12, he took Mary to a pond to splash and have a drink. According to one witnesss, Eldridge poked her behind the ear with a hook when Mary reached down to nibble at a piece of watermelon. This enraged Mary, who snatched Eldridge with her trunk, tossed him against a drink stand, then crushed his head by stepping on it.

The sensationalist newspapers of the time went even further in their accounts, claiming that Mary had tossed Eldridge in the air, skewered him with her tusks (despite the fact that female Asian elephants don't have tusks), then trampled him "with all the force of her beastly fury."

Accounts of what followed are somewhat confused, although most say that Mary calmed down immediately afterwards and didn't charge the crowd or appear aggressive. A crowd surrounded Mary, however, chanting "Kill the elephant!" A few minutes later, a local blacksmith shot at her five times, with no real effect. Mary was chained up while the circus decided what to do with her.

In the meantime, the leaders of several nearby towns threatened to cancel circus performances if Mary was part of the show. Circus owner Charlie Sparks reluctantly decided that the only way to solve the problem was to execute Mary in public.

On September 13, 1916, Mary was transported by train to a railyard in Erwin, Tennessee, where a crowd of more than 2,500 people—including the town's children—gathered to watch. Mary was hanged by the neck from an industrial crane mounted on a railcar. The first attempt broke the chain, dropping Mary to the ground and breaking her hip.

As people fled in horror, the severely injured Mary was hauled up again, dying in agony during this second attempt. She was buried by the railway tracks.

This was not the end of Mary's legacy, however. For one thing, it was the last time an elephant was hanged as a means of execution, although there have been other equally stupid and inhumane methods used over the years. More importantly, Mary's sad story has been enshrined in a number of plays, stories and even songs as a cautionary tale about our mistreatment of other species.

Although heavily doctored, this photograph is apparently
similar to most images of Mary's death.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elephantmary.jpg

To Support Elephant Welfare

World Wildlife Fund

World Society for the Protection of Animals

Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information

on a number of sanctuaries around the world)

Performing Animal Welfare Society

Zoocheck

Bring the Elephant Home

African Wildlife Foundation

Elephants Without Borders 

Save the Elephants

International Elephant Foundation Elephant's World (Thailand) 

David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

Elephant Nature Park (Thailand)

Wildlife Trust of India

Elephant No. 143: Fair Isle Knitting

While sorting through a bunch of stuff, I came across a book with a few charted patterns for elephants, so today I thought I'd try Fair Isle knitting.

Fair Isle is a stranded knitting technique, named for the tiny island of Fair Isle in the Shetland Islands. Although two-colour knitting is thought to be almost as old as knitting itself, stranded knitting likely developed in the Arab world in the twelfth century A.D., later spreading to Europe. Stranded knitting is believed to have reached Fair Isle around A.D. 1500.

As various forms of knitting became mechanized during the nineteenth century, traditional hand knitting industries such as the production of socks and lace began to suffer. In response, two-colour knitting—which was still largely produced by hand—grew in popularity throughout the Shetland Islands, including Fair Isle. Bright, natural colours were produced with local flora and imported dyes, and trademark designs evolved.

Fair Isle knitting was given a boost in 1921, when the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII, who abdicated for Wallis Simpson) wore a Fair Isle pullover in public. His mother Queen Mary also wore Fair Isle garments, and soon Fair Isle sweaters were all the rage.

Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), in his
Fair Isle sweater, 1921.
Source: http://helloblackbird.blogspot.com/2010/12/gant-rugger-
farisle-sic-sweater.html

Today, Fair Isle often refers to any kind of stranded knitting in two colours or more—although "stranded colourwork" is the preferred term, with "Fair Isle" reserved for patterns specific to the Shetland Islands.


For today's elephant, I decided to use a pattern from the book The Tap Dancing Lizard by Catherine Cartwright-Jones and Roy Jones. I've had the book for a long time, but never used it before. This is the pattern I chose:

To be honest, this kind of knitting has always scared me a little. I've tried Fair Isle patterns before, but I've always found it a bit difficult to keep the tension even, as Fair Isle requires carrying strands of yarn across the back. While this isn't an issue when the repeats in your pattern are frequent, it becomes more fiddly when you have wide expanses of the same colour, as in the pattern I chose. For more on Fair Isle techinques, check out some of the tutorials available online, including this one.

For yarn, I used a couple of balls of a cotton/rayon blend that I've had for awhile, but could never decide how to use.

The pattern I chose is 56 stitches wide, but I cast on a few extra stitches to allow for a bit of room on the sides. I also knitted four rows before starting the pattern itself.

I decided to carry both colours across the entire back, even though the darker colour doesn't continue to the edge. I thought this might make a more even knitted fabric. I twisted the two yarns together every three or four stitches, depending on what the pattern was doing.

This went relatively quickly, the most difficult part being following the pattern. To help me keep my place, I used a wide Post-It note to mark the row I was on, placing it above the working line. This allowed me to relate what I was doing to the row I had just finished. I don't know if this is the best way, but it's usually the way I work a needlepoint pattern, so I figured it would work here.

This took me a couple of hours, but I'm surprised at how well it worked out. I expected it to be bumpy and weird, but it was remarkably flat when I was finished. To further flatten the top and bottom, which had a tendency to roll, I dampened the final piece and ironed it using the cotton setting on my iron.

 

I'm not sure what I think of these two colours together, but I'm very happy with how nice the final piece looks, and how even it is. With decent results like this, I might even be convinced to try something like this again.

Elephant Lore of the Day
I was told a rather charming story yesterday by an older English weaver who lived in Wales as a child. When Pat was young, the circus overwintered near the town of Porthmadog on the edge of Snowdonia National Park, and one of the elephants was an avid cricketer.

Each day, the female Asian elephant would wait for the children to get out of school, cricket bat held in her trunk. When she would see the children coming, she would get very excited, waving the bat around. Pat said that the children were allowed to throw the ball at the elephant, who would then hit it with the cricket bat. According to Pat, the elephant was highly accurate at hitting the ball, although perhaps not always accurate at scoring.

Elephants still play cricket in some circuses, as seen in this video, and the 2011 Cricket World Cup featured an elephant mascot named Stumpy.

Stumpy, mascot of the 2011 Cricket World Cup.
Source: http://trak.in/tags/business/2011/02/18/top-10-facts-icc-cricket-world-cup/

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society
Zoocheck
Bring the Elephant Home
African Wildlife Foundation
Elephants Without Borders 
Save the Elephants   

International Elephant Foundation

Elephant No. 139: Crocheted Wool

For today's elephant, I actually had a different activity in mind, but I needed to have prepared something the day before, so that was out. Instead, I thought I'd try to crochet a little mohair elephant.

I covered crochet history in a recent blog post, so today I'll just describe what I did.

I started out with some wool I had spun—yes, I've finally learned how to make real yarn—but it was a bit too uneven for something like a little animal.

Next I took a pretty lavender yarn made mostly of rayon, but it was too shiny and kept splitting, which was pretty irksome for this particular activity.

Finally I tried some multicoloured mohair left over from a scarf. I liked the way it handled, so that was something. Unfortunately, it didn't really work with any of the patterns I had. I tried three different patterns I found for free online, but none of them was quite right. Although they were all small and not terribly difficult, one would have required more yarn than I had; one was inordinately complicated for the time I had; and one was too hard to make with this particular yarn.

I decided to make up some sort of pattern instead. I'm by no means any kind of crochet expert, but I at least know how to do the basic stitches. More to the point, crochet lends itself remarkably well to making stuff up.

I didn't write anything down, so I can't really tell you how I made this, other than to say it falls primarily into the dog's-breakfast school of crochet—in other words, it's completely chaotic. I'm just lucky that the fluffy mohair yarn hides a multitude of sins.

To start, I chained six stitches, slip stitched the end together, then spiralled around in single crochet, increasing the size of the circle as I went.

Once it had reached a reasonable diameter, I began decreasing the number of stitches to arrive at a hollow shape. When it was almost finished, I stuffed a bunch of fibrefill into the cavity, then continued decreasing the number of stitches in single crochet until I had closed the gap.

Next, I turned my attention to the head. Starting with a ring of four stiches, I created a round ball for the head, using the same method as I'd used for the body. When the head was almost complete, I stuffed the cavity with a small amount of fibrefill. I decreased in single crochet again, as I'd done for the body, closing the opening.

To create the trunk, I picked up four stitches around the front of the face, and spiralled down the trunk in a very weird technique I don't even know how to describe, other than to say you pick up a stitch from the previous row with each spiral. To finish the trunk, I chained two and pulled the yarn end back up through the trunk to hide it.

To add ears, I picked up two stitches on each side of the head, adding single crochet in rows over these two stitches, increasing and decreasing to create a shape I liked.

Next came the legs. These were made by chaining four, and using single crochet to spiral upwards for five rows. For the tail, I picked up a stitch at the back of the elephant, chained four stitches, then tied it off and frayed the end. And finally, to construct the elephant, I sewed the head onto the body, and sewed on the four legs wherever they looked best to me. They're not across from one another, or in line with one another at all—one, because I don't like symmetry; and two, because it gave the elephant a bit more personality.

The neck looked a bit spindly when I was done, so I aded a little scarf, made of three strands of the same wool, simply knotted twice around the wee creature's neck.

This project was monumentally annoying until I settled on a yarn and decided to make up my own pattern. After that, I was much happier with the process.

I'm quite pleased with the final elephant. It's kind of cute, and I like the weird yarn. The mohair makes it impossible to see the individual stitches—and I was too lazy to write anything down as I went—so I'll never be able to repeat this. Then again, maybe that's a good thing.

Elephant Lore of the Day
When I started making today's elephant, the colourful yarn made me think of painted festival elephants. It also looks like an elephant who's just celebrated the Indian festival of Holi. Holi is a two-day spring festival in which people fling coloured powder at one another, often adding water to make it even worse. Most people come away looking like my little mohair elephant.

Holi powder being tossed from elephants during the annual
Jaipur Elephant Festival, India.
Source: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_18-3-2003_pg9_12

Elephants are often an integral part of the Holi festival. In the western Indian state of Rajasthan, the annual elephant festival coincides with Holi. During the festival, people mounted on the backs of painted elephants fling coloured powder at people in the crowd, often dousing the elephants as well.

Pink Holi powder tossed from the back of an elephant,
Jaipur Elephant Festival, India.
Source: http://www.dipity.com/tickr/Flickr_gulal/

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society
Zoocheck
Bring the Elephant Home  
African Wildlife Foundation  
Elephants Without Borders   
Save the Elephants  
International Elephant Foundation

Elephant No. 135: Crocheted Lace

At my fibre arts guild meeting today, the theme was crochet, so I decided to try a piece of crocheted lace for today's elephant.

Crochet—French for "hook"—involves the use of a hook-like needle to create lace, garments, jewellery and more. Little is known of the early history of crochet, although some have suggested that it could have evolved from traditional practices originating in China, South America or the Middle East.

The first written reference to crochet-type stitches appears in the nineteenth-century book The Memoirs of a Highland Lady by Elizabeth Grant, who describes something called "shepherd's knitting". By 1824, crochet patterns were being published, and by the middle of the century crocheting had become a popular form of needlework, particularly among women.

Early crochet hooks varied considerably. Bent needles embedded in cork handles were widely used by Irish laceworkers, while wealthy women used silver, brass, steel, ivory and bone hooks, often set in elaborate handles. Many of these were not terribly practical—designed, as one source says, "to show off a lady's hands [rather than] to work with thread."

One of the more elaborate and beautiful forms of crocheted lace is known as "Irish lace". Interestingly, this type of crochet developed during the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1849, as a form of famine relief. Irish workers produced lace as a way of making money, and Irish lace was highly popular in both Europe and the United States until the First World War. These elaborate patterns were much sought after by the wealthy in particular, and I've been told that a dress made of Irish lace from the early twentieth century would have sold for the equivalent of $20,000 U.S. in today's currency.

Nineteenth-century Irish lace. This is a more elaborate form of Irish lace,
known as "needlepoint lace".
Photo: Alexa Bender
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Irish_crochet.jpg

Today's elephant is somewhat similar to Irish lace, although nowhere near as elaborate. I found a free Japanese pattern online, which I thought was kind of cute. It was also entirely in Japanese, which would have made it off-limits to me, but for a diagram that looked like it might hold a clue as to how it was made.

Not that I had any clue. I'd never seen a diagram like this before, and had no idea what the symbols meant. To me, it looked more like an embroidery pattern. Luckily, at the fibre arts guild there were people who knew exactly what it all meant—and what's more, gave me the equivalent of a crochet-English dictionary.

It looked pretty simple now that I knew what the symbols meant, so I took some fine crochet cotton and a tiny hook. I'm by no means an expert at crochet, and I'd never made lace before, but I figured it couldn't be that hard. I've always thought that crochet is far easier than knitting, so confidence was high. Silly me.

I started by making the head. Without printed instructions, I wasn't sure if that's where I was supposed to start, but this seemed to work out well enough.

It also seemed fairly straightforward to create the neck.

Then I got to the flowered body. I must have taken it out about six times. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how the flowers attached to the body while being crocheted. After I ripped out the stitches for the sixth time, it suddenly hit me that, if I made the flowers separately, I could then crochet them into place and crochet some other stuff around them.

Easier said than done. One, my hands were getting kind of cramped from working so small. Two, I hadn't a clue as to how you attach flowers to the middle of nothing. I finally managed to figure something out, but I'm sure that if any real crochet expert had been watching me, they would have either laughed or rolled their eyes. Sometimes it's good to work alone.

Once I got the stupid flowers fixed in place, I worked more stitches around that part, added some legs, and a tail. I didn't think it would be very interesting to look at any of that in progress, so this is the final body.

The last touch was adding the ear, which is the only three-dimensional element. I couldn't figure this out, either. While I could easily see how the ear was made, I couldn't figure out how it got crocheted into the head. After about four attempts at this, I finally rigged something that seemed to work. I actually liked making the ear and think it's rather pretty, in the end.

I didn't enjoy making this at all, but that's mostly because I didn't know what I was doing and probably needed written instructions in a language I could read. I guess it's not really enough to have a diagram if you don't know how to make lace in the first place.

I really like the final elephant, however. It's only about 7.5 x 6.5 cm (3 x 2.5 inches), so it's rather sweet. I even forgive it for irritating me. I may try lace again sometime—but I think I should probably look for instructions in a language other than Japanese.

Elephant Lore of the Day
Like a number of other species, elephants appear to rejoice when reunited with others of their species—and particularly members of their extended clan. One writer has described the celebration as "raucous".

The elephants will run over to one another, flap their ears, spin about excitedly, and greet one another with a low rumble. Those who have witnessed the phenomenon have described it as "unabashed jubilation" and "unfettered joy".

To Support Elephant Welfare
World Wildlife Fund
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Elephant sanctuaries (this Wikipedia list allows you to click through to information on a number of sanctuaries around the world)
Performing Animal Welfare Society
Zoocheck
Bring the Elephant Home
African Wildlife Foundation 

Elephants Without Borders  

Save the Elephants

Elephant No. 63: Knitting

For today's elephant, I decided to knit the smallest thing I could find online. I was originally looking to make a knitted finger puppet, but I liked this tiny toy just as much.

The oldest knitted object to date is a pair of multicoloured knitted socks, found in Egypt and thought to have been made in the fourth century A.D. Most sources believe that knitting likely originates somewhere in the Middle East, spreading first to Europe, and later to the Americas.

The earliest knitting in Europe was produced by Muslim knitters working for the Spanish royal family. The designs produced by these master knitters were very elaborate, often worked in fine silk with as many as eight stitches per centimetre (twenty stitches per inch). Knitted items in this early period included cushion covers, wall hangings, clothing, and accessories such as gloves and stockings. Interestingly, the purl stitch—the reverse of a basic knit stitch—was unknown at the time, and knitters knit in the round on multiple needles, later cutting pieces apart if they were intended to lay flat.

From the fourteenth century onwards, knitted goods were produced for everyday use, and even the Virgin Mary is shown knitting in several medieval paintings. By the sixteenth century, the purl stitch had made its appearance, allowing for the creation of textured patterns within the knitted fabric.

"The Knitting Madonna" from the
right wing of the Buxtehude Altar, 1400–1410.
Meister Bertram von Minden (1345–1425)
Collection of the Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KnittingMadonna.jpg

Knitting was originally done only by men, with the first knitting trade guild established in Paris in 1527. Knitting schools were also set up beginning in the sixteenth century, providing poorer families with a source of income. Stockings were the most important knitted item of the time, and English stockings in particular were exported to Germany, the Netherlands and Spain.

The first knitting machine—known as a "stocking machine" since that was its primary purpose—was invented by Englishman William Lee in 1529. Although the machine remained relatively unchanged for more than two centuries, by the early eighteenth century, new knitting "frames" and machines were being developed, allowing for the mass-production of larger items such as blankets and garments. As patterned fabrics became popular, various technical advances allowed coloured patterns to be knit right into the cloth, rather than embroidered on afterwards.

These days, most knitted items are produced on machines. Until a few decades ago, however, hand-knitting was still a relatively economical way to produce garments and other necessities. It was also common for home-based knitters to unravel worn-out garments, reusing the yarn to make something new. Hand-knitting has since become a primarily artisanal activity, used to produce unique clothing, textile arts and even high fashion knitwear.

For today's elephant, I used an online pattern by Melissa Mall. It involved working on a set of double-pointed needles to create a series of tube shapes in various sizes, so I chose a grey wool I had on hand, and used needles approximately the size indicated in the pattern.

I started by making the body. Not having knit in the round since I was about 13, this was harder than I expected it to be. I dropped stitches, twisted them around the wrong way, and had to start over a couple of times. The pieces are so tiny that I don't think I ever got the technique down perfectly. Making a sock might actually have been easier,  because a sock is big enough to see what you're doing.

After I made the body, I made the head, then two ears, four legs, and a trunk.

When the parts were all made, I stuffed the head and body with a bit of polyester fibrefill, then sewed them together. The pattern also said to wind some yarn around the neck to define it a bit better, so I did that too.

After that, I sewed on trunk, then ears, then legs.

The last thing to go on was a tail. The pattern also called for me to knit a little scarf, but I actually preferred to use two strands of fancy scrap yarn I had, simply knotting them together at each end. He's only a little over 5 cm (2 inches) tall, so the two tiny scarves that I started to knit still looked too big.

The pattern leaves it up to you to decide whether or not to add eyes. I kind of like him without eyes for now, although I may change my mind later.

I'm pretty happy with the final result, although it's not the most tidy knitting I've ever done. I also made him out of 100% wool, so if I wanted to make him even smaller, I could throw him in the washing machine—then again, maybe that would be a little cruel.

Elephant Lore of the Day
One of the most unlikely animal friendships is the bond between the baby African elephant Themba and Albert the sheep.

Themba was orphaned in 2008 at the age of six months, when its mother fell over a cliff. Vets at the Sanbona wildlife reserve in South Africa hoped that another elephant cow would adopt Themba; when that didn't happen, they took him in to make sure he didn't starve to death.

At the Shamwari Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in the Eastern Cape region, Themba met Albert. The friendship did not have an auspicious beginning. Themba dashed over to the sheep, and chased Albert around the watering hole. Albert was deeply unimpressed, ultimately running to the far end of the segregated enclosure for safety. He stayed there for the first half-day.

Themba was very curious about Albert, however, and kept walking over to Albert, sticking his trunk through the bars and touching the sheep gently on the back. By the next morning, Albert had started venturing into the main enclosure. The two began exploring their enclosure together, with Themba's trunk resting companionably on Albert's back. After that day, the two became inseparable.

Interestingly, instead of Themba copying Albert's behaviour and behaving like a sheep, Albert copies Themba and behaves like an elephant. Albert eats what Themba eats, and has been learning Themba's technique for eating thorny acacia bushes.

Since the ultimate goal is to reacclimatize Themba to life in the wild, sadly the pair may one day be separated.

Albert and Themba snacking on an acacia tree: a tree that is not
normally part of a sheep's diet.
Photo: ©Caters
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1084689/
Pictured-The-baby-elephant-adopted-sheep.html