Viola the Narwhal

When we came up with the idea of All Things Weird and Wonderful we made a list of all the different animals we wanted to try and turn into crochet patterns. Very near the top of that list was a narwhal. We love unicorns and of course narwhals are the unicorns of the ocean. These animals are beautiful and almost mystical with their amazing horns, they definitely meet the criteria of weird and wonderful.

Designing our animals starts off with a little bit of research. We have a bit of a collection of animal books, which are great for reference, but a quick Google search and we had plenty of images to work from.

Now we have a good idea of what we want to create we start to look at yarns. What a minefield that can be! Being new to the world of running a craft business we don't really have the funds to buy loads of yarn. Luckily we both have our own sizable yarn stashes. We both often work with StyleCraft Special DK and because of their huge array of colours and affordability we decided to start there.

We wanted to add our own spin on the narwhal so didn't go for the usual grey, instead we decided upon Duck Egg and for the horn we chose Cream.

Hannah decided she would be the one to write this pattern...

I knew what I was aiming for so I grabbed my trusty 4mm hook and began. When writing patterns I tend to just 'go with it'. As I crochet I write down the stitches, if they are wrong they get crossed out and written again.

I broke the narwhal down into basic shapes. A body, fins, tail and horn. All our patterns use the basic crochet stitches (UK terms) Double crochet, increase by doing 2 double crochets in a stitch and decreasing by double crocheting 2 stitches together.

After all the body parts are created it's time to sew them all together. I always leave plenty of tail, it makes this job a bit easier. 

To make the horn a little bit more special we used a sparkly crochet yarn to embroider on a spiral design.

So the pattern was written and one prototype had been made. The next part of the process is to test the pattern. If it's one of my patterns Cara will test it and visa versa, if it's Cara's pattern then I test it.

If the pattern needs changing (fingers crossed it doesn't) then it can be. Also when testing the pattern it's time to weigh how much yarn and stuffing is used. 

Once we are completely happy the pattern can be typed out and the kits can be made up. We always provide more stuffing and yarn than we use to allow for peoples tension and we would hate it if you didn't have enough to finish your project. 

What else goes into the kits? As well as the yarn and stuffing there are the safety eyes, full pattern with words and pictures, any embroidery threads needed and a hand drawn stitch marker. 

So Viola is all ready to be packaged up and that's what Cara and I will be up to this week, printing packaging and making up the kits ready to be sold.

As ever we would love your feed back on this design and we will let you know when they are available to buy.

Hook happy,

Hannah and Cara