A special niece asked me to make this guy for her friend’s new son, Calvin.

Rav says Hugs Light is a DK yarn. I’ve followed the pattern and am holding the yarn doubled throughout. The yarn isn’t scratchy. But held doubled and at this gauge it squeaks sometimes. I’m not fond of yarn that talks back at me! Now that I’ve seen that I was able to knit this, I wish I’d found these colors in a better yarn.

The Turkish cast on link in the pattern provided excellent directions. And the slip stitch jogless stripes worked well too. When knitting the limb (and tail) stripes, carry the black yarn up on the inside without twisting it, to avoid black showing through on the public side. Just don’t pull tightly when you start a black round. I stitched up openings from the inside, as I saw them forming, e.g. the base of thumbs, the crotch, and the underarms.

Despite buying the designer’s tutorial on working intarsia in the round, I simply didn’t understand the discussion about pulling the “loop” of yarn and the photos in the tutorial didn’t help me. For others, it’s been a different experience. I am pretty sure whatever method you use for intarsia in the round, you will have to cut the black yarn after each stripe. With 5 rounds of orange it won’t work out that the black is in the right spot when you need it.

One side of the intarsia join looks good without any work. But the other side, where the turn to purl is made…not so good. What I did was to anchor the turning side by attaching a long thread of white yarn at the base of that side of the tummy. At each turn to purl, or each continuation to knit on that side, I anchor the work with a twist of the working yarn with the white yarn tail, tugging a bit to tighten the connection. I neatened up a few messy spots with mattress stitch, working from the outside.

I decided I wanted the back of the ears to be stockinette so I doubled the stitches and knit them in the round, otherwise following the directions. That also made it easier to sew the white inner ear onto the black.

I watched a few You Tube videos on the embroidery stitch, stem stitch, for the mouth. This is the best one I found, including because the stitcher works in yarn:link text

I needed far less yarn than the pattern called for, even doubling the yarn, and more orange than the other colors: 78 grams of white, 84 grams of orange, and 49 grams of black. My Hobbes is 20 inches tall.