Someone posted a photo of a knitted balloon dog on a Facebook group, and I had to make one. I found the book–The Knitter’s Activity Book, by Louise Walker, and decided to use two Caron Cakes that didn’t go with any of the other Caron Cakes I had in stash. I waited till my husband, who is a professional balloon twister, was out of town for a long weekend so I could surprise him when he got back.
I started by trying to make the increases on my Bond knitting machine. After an hour or two, I realized that wasn’t going to happen. The number of stitches doubles every other row. I decided it would be easier to do the increases and decreases by hand and to do the straight parts on the machine, so I made a very long strip with waste yarn in between each part of the balloon dog. I used a ravel cord on each side of the waste yarn, but I probably could have skipped that step.
For the record, it’s faster to frog in reverse order–start taking the strip apart at the nose end. After a few limbs, I realized it was faster to decrease at each end of the join and then knit two rows of six stitches together.
Cast on combs from KrisKrafter. I’m using half a full-size comb for this, knitting over 48 stitches. I have rug hooks I bought for something else, and I use those, weighted with bunches of 10 keys wired together, as knitting weights.
I should have left more yarn un-knit between sections. In some places, I did not have enough to do the decrease rows in the same color. I was able to get a close match, but I could have solved this problem by measuring the amount of yarn needed for the decrease rows (about five yards) and tying it off at each section.
I’m wearing a t-shirt that has a picture of Emperor penguins on the front.
I tested the first decrease while the knitting was still attached to the machine to see if the idea would work. It worked.
In reality, balloon dogs are one color, because latex balloons are one color. But I had Caron Cake I wasn’t going to use for anything else, and the colors work with our decor. And they were paid for.
I didn’t think about what I would stuff the dog with until the end. Something that was meant to be a cute idea could take a lot of stuffing. I wandered around the house and found a roll of rug padding we had trimmed from the living room carpet. It wasn’t in great shape, but we had a lot of it.
I cut a tapered rectangle to a fixed width so that all four legs and both ears were the same size as the others. I taped the roll together with masking tape and then wrapped the roll in a plastic grocery bag to keep the rug padding from working through the knitting.
Working outside, I stitched the sections enough to hold the padding inside, and then finished stitching them inside later.
The nearly finished balloon dog, assembled. He won’t stand up on his own, and I added a wire frame later.
It might have been easier to bend out a frame first, wrap the parts with the rug padding, and stitch the knitting over the shaped frame. As it is, I bent metal from plastic yard signs, and they have a lot of sharp edges. I will not leave this dog out if the grandchildren come to visit.
