a TARDIS for Milo

I don't know if I've gotten into this yet, but I am a total nerd.  I mean spending the better part of my spare time surrounded by a couch full of yarn, and that fact that I named my dog Oy might hint to that, but it might not have been that explicit yet.  (For the record, Oy is an amazing character in Stephen King's Dark Tower series, it starts with the book The Gunslinger and will be the best thing you've ever read).

I will readily admit it- I love Doctor Who.  I'm fairly certain that Clara is already my favorite companion, I cried like a baby at the end of Angels Take Manhattan (both times I watched it), and do not like choosing a favorite doctor because every time there's a new one I hate it and then learn to love him, and let's be real it's all the same time lord, so why choose?

I'm actually quite astounded that this is my first Doctor Who themed post!  I'm in the process of working out some wonderful charts and patterns for washcloths with different characters on them which I love.  But this post is a magnificent crocheted TARDIS!  This stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space and is the time/space craft of the Doctor.  It looks like a police box because it's camouflage broke one time in 1960's England, but it's much bigger on the inside, as they are so fond of pointing out.

This one is a gift for my dear friend and college roommate, Milo.  She is a fellow sci-fi enthusiast and very good friend, and I am quite excited to pass along this little cutie.

Modified Stockinette Snake

 I studied biology in college, and totally love (almost)  all things creepy crawly- snakes, frogs, and beetles being my top three.  I even spent a year of college doing research on South African Clawed frogs, and spent a lot of my free time abroad in East Africa looking up insects that I found around camp.  My mom would tell you I've been like this pretty much forever.  I remember once thinking I was ingenious in using a bubble tape gum container to hold my ants so I could bring them inside to play with them and not soon after was shocked to find it empty. Sorry mom!

Joe and I are even the proud owners of not one, but two snakes.  I have a very scared and wimpy ball python named Bruce, whose an absolutely gorgeous pastel morph for those of you who know what that means.  Joe's is a larger iridescent Imperator Boa.  If anything Joe is even more into herpetology than I am, so I am lucky to have found someone equally weird.


So now you can understand how totally thrilled I was when I found this amazing pattern for a knit snake on purl bee! (Which, as a side-note I am really hook-on right now, so there will be more modifications coming your way).

The recipe calls for making it striped with two kinds of yarn, but because I'm impatient as all get out and because I had a yarn that had some built-in stripes I modified it for just one color.  I used an old skein of Caron Simply Soft Shadows that I had around, but I'm not sure they make it anymore. As for the needles I used, they're from my grandmother's collection, and I don't have the faintest clue what size they are.  You could use DPN's instead easily.

Here's the best part of this project:  it's knitted flat!  And you don't have to do any seams or merging or stuffing or anything.  It uses the basic stockinette stitch (knit one side, purl the other) and just naturally curls into itself to make itself round!  It's amazing and SUPER easy.  If you're someone whose only ever done scarves and knitting and purling you could do this!