Bat Pillow with Chart

I created a bat pillow as a Christmas pressie for my friend Karen.

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I have been meaning to post the chart for the bat pillow for a while. It is actually the item I have the most favorites for on Ravelry. *grin*

Here is the chart for the pillow:

PDF

http://akasha.onmyweigh.com/data/moon-bat-chart.pdf

JPG

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The original chart was created with Knitpro. It is a terrific free tool that allows you to chart patterns for knitting as well as other needle crafts.

http://www.microrevolt.org/knitPro/

The original graphic was a Gorey drawing. However, I reduced the amount of detail involved as I didn't think it translated well to the knitting. I figured if there was too much detail it would be confusing what it was.

Despite reducing the image to white & black and removing a lot of line work in the drawing, Knitpro created a lot of greys in the pattern. So I have changed those squares to either black or white.

I used a combination of intarsia and fair isle for the colorwork. I found it made more sense to use fair isle for the white stitches that form the edge of the moon and the beginning of the bat wings.

I start at the bottom, adding the white intarsia piece. Then as the bat wing came along I used two sections of black at each side. So basically until you get to the bat's feet, you have a black section, white, then black with small white bobbins for the fair isle bits of the moon's edges.

When I came to the bat's feet, I added another bobbin of yarn. I worked that bobbin to form the bat's body. The feet were fair isle while the body was intarsia. When the body became intarsia, I needed to make a small white bobbin for the area between the left wing and the body.

If you look at the layout, you can see the point where it becomes nearly black with just the slivers of white at the edges. The edges continue to be fair isle.

When you are at the head area, it is very similar to the body in reverse.

I hope this makes some sense. Honestly, the chart is probably more than enough for a lot of folks. This was only my second intarsia project and my first using fair isle. So I suspect if I could do it, most anyone can!

I did reference the videos on knittinghelp.com for these techniques. I went really wrong with my first intarsia project because I wasn't paying attention to the technique as closely as I should have. Though when I watched the video, it clicked for me. So I suspect that will help others as well.

If you have any questions about this, please feel free to leave a reply or email me. I will try and respond.