Zebedee Zebra

For the last month or so the top of the cupboard in the living room where we store TV series box sets has been home to my unfinished knitting projects. With my Mum and Stepdad coming to stay (and my husband champing at the bit to rearrange our living room) I needed to clear off this space.

One of the things up there was the body and a leg belonging to the rainbow stripe zebra I had started knitting from Sarah Keen's Knitted Wild Animals book. A few years ago I made a trio of elephants from this book. They turned out amazing but there was so much sewing involved that it kind of put me off trying any other the other patterns. But a while ago I decided that one thing currently missing from my life was a cuddly zebra.

At the time that I cast on for it my white yarn was buried at the bottom of the cupboard with all my other knitting stuff so it wasn't easily accessed. So I went with what I had to hand; black and rainbow yarn.

In the last three weeks I've worked on him, off and on (mostly off), finally finishing him the day after my Mum left (after spending hours and hours wrestling with the loopy stitch for his mane). I was running low on my stuffing supplies so after stuffing most of his body and one leg he had to sit unfinished on the windowsill for a while until last Saturday when I was able to nip into town and top up.

Last Saturday I felt like having a knitting day. So of course I actually did very little in the way of knitting (I barely even blogged) because I was determined to sew up my latest little toy.

And he's turned out fabulously.

I sat watching Bones and furiously mattress stitching him together (all except the base, I learnt my lesson from the elephants and sewed that together inside out). Mr Click was upstairs taking a long relaxing bath and by the time he returned downstairs Zeb had gone from being a torso with two legs to having arms and a wobbly, half-stitched on head.

As soon as he was finished and all the fiddly bits sewn on (like his hair and his cute little tail, not pictured) I held him up to Mr Click and said 'he needs a name'. Mr Click promptly said 'Zebedee' and that's been his name ever since. What other name could there possibly be for a rainbow striped zebra?

As you can see from the pictures above, Zebedee Zebra enjoys tinkling the ivories; he also likes playing skittles. I have no idea where he is going to live at the moment. I'm not sure if he's just visiting or if he'll be a permanent resident in my house. Since he was completed, he's spent a lot of time on the living room windowsill, gazing out the window so perhaps he's looking for someplace else to stay.

But I'm quite attached to him so I might just see if I can convince him to stay a wee bit longer.