August 8, 2016

Whale Song

When we left off there was a lot of kindness going on, and I decided to make one more thing to go into the care package to these lovely ladies. A whale. Why a whale? Well my friend, she has her own art studio called Whalesong Arts and I thought it might be fun to make a crochet whales as colorful as the ones she creates in oil pastels and paints.

A photo posted by Whalesong Arts (@whalesongarts) on

I bought a palette of yarn by Lion Brand in the Happy color scheme as I thought it might look nice with the heart afghan I also made her. I used the free pattern for Richard the Whale by Stacy Trock, which I liked a lot for the texture on him.

Of course I got the fins done and most of the tail when I realized I forgot about the ribbing part... But as my husband pointed out, the color change was pretty cool all by itself and the ribbing might make it look too busy. In the end I agreed with him and kept going. Good thing too since I'm not sure how embroidering on that ribbing would have looked.
The bag of colors made this much whale. 
Working up the body was no trouble at all. There is a large section of the body pattern that is implied based off the previous rows, so I spent a little time expanding those rows out so I didn't have to keep track in my head.
Fins
Something to note... there are more than one kind of pack of these small colored skeins, and it turns out I bought one with 135 yards for this project which called for 150 yards. So I pulled the dark blue out of my leftover yarns and was able to finish this off.

The pattern just calls for saftey eyes, but I really wanted to make this more like her whales, so I added some black embroidery to try to get that signature smile and lines onto the whale. I really like the way it turned out.

It really made me smile when it was done. I mean look at that face...

Difficulty: Easy
Time to complete: 5 hours
Size: about 10 inches long
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