Knitted Dinosaurs

For the past few years, I’ve been teaching myself how to knit. I don’t have too much time for knitting in the midst of travel and writing and working on my PhD, but I usually have a knitting project or two that I work on while watching a movie on the weekend. I’m not a very advanced knitter– I pretty much just knit scarves and hats. A few months ago I tried to knit slippers for my husband, but I ended up with three different size slippers. Oops. Recently, though, a friend of mine introduced me to the knitting patterns from Jean Greenhowe Designs. These designs are fantastic– all you have to know how to do is knit, purl, increase, and decrease. There are no complicated stitches or instructions, and there are hundreds of adorable little creatures and other knick-knacks. Since most of the items in the patterns are small, they knit up fairly quickly… unlike that sweater I started once and probably won’t ever finish. Some of the designs are a too cutesy for my taste– for example, the scarecrows and clowns. In fact, I’m sure that I won’t ever knit one of the clowns because clowns used to terrify me as a child. However, I do like many of the patterns, including some of the delightful Christmas ornaments and other decorations. For my first Jean Greenhowe project, I recently made two of the mini Christmas stockings (free pattern available here), and they’ve come out very well. I plan to use the mini stockings to decorate the first Christmas/Newtonmas/Saturnalia tree that my husband and I will have together.

Now that I’ve mastered the simple mini stocking, I plan to move onto more advanced Christmas decorations. Originally, I was going to move on to a Snowman or perhaps a Santa Claus. But then I discovered that Jean Greenhowe has DINOSAUR knitting patterns in her book “Toy Collection.” So, now I plan on knitting mini dinosaurs with Christmas scarves. I just ordered the pattern book, and I can’t wait for it to arrive. I think these knitted dinosaurs will make excellent Christmas decorations and also excellent Christmas gifts for my geologist friends.

I’ll post pictures of my own dinosaurs once I knit them, but for now here are some pictures taken from Jean Greenhowe’s website. I plan to try to knit all of these dinosaurs, scientifically inaccurate Cavemen friends and all! Meanwhile, can any paleontologists (maybe Brian Switek?) help me identify these knitted dinosaurs species? I think there’s a T-Rex and a Pterosaur, but that’s about all I can say.