Snailed It!

This was such a fun project but also a test of skill - it was my third ever project I worked on.

It combined a lot of new themes which I hadn't previously used - turning a project, sewing & stuffing the snails together from the 3 separate parts and more.

They took a lot of patience to be able to create, but as soon as I created my first snail, I fell in love with the process.

I then made 3 snails to give as gifts to family members who complain about snails (mainly the fact they eat everything in sight). As I was making more than one, I decided to make them in stages.

I started by knitting three lots of the top half of the snail, then three parts of the bottom of the snail and then I put them together to make three slugs. I kept a piece of thread out the centre of their head for a later stage of the project. I won't lie to you, I had a lot of fun decorating my Mum's indoor plants with the slugs and leaving them for her to find over the next few days!! (one example can be seen in the first photo).

From there, I knitted all three shells before putting them together and stuffing them. This allowed me to get the snails to "try on" the shells to see which one suited which shell (as no two projects are ever the same!)

I then attached the selected shell to each snail before taking part in my least favourite part of the project ever - knitting the eyestalks.

It's not that they were difficult to create, they were actually quite simple, but they just stressed me out for some reason. When creating the eyestalks, I realised that I had got that part of the design wrong in the first ever snail I made - I knitted one eyestalk but made it out to be two stalks (attaching the middle of the stalk to the snails head), instead of making two separate stalks. Mistakes happen sometimes, it allows you to learn from them, and I did.

I made the two eyestalks for the snails and attached them (using the thread I left out the top of the head). However I found they didn't sit well on the snail where they were attached separately, so for the last couple of snails, I doubled the length of the one eyestalk and attached it by stitching the centre of the snails head.

These were made back in September-October last year and I haven't made any since. However I am hoping to start creating some more soon, ready for the reopening of my Etsy shop.

Below are some photos of my snails - they all have captions so you can read a bit more about them.

Slugs Hiding Out...

One of the slugs kept leaping out the decorative sticks, so I rearranged them.

This is the first snail (before his eyestalks were attached) - note how in this one, I didn't leave the thread out for attaching the stalk.

This is the second snail I completed (again, before adding the eyestalks, but this one did have the thread out)

In case you couldn't tell, I loved the pumpkin photo theme!!

Autumnal snail shoot, featuring Snail 3

How cute are they!! Especially in an autumnal pumpkin themed shoot!!

I had so much fun (about 50+ photos worth of fun) with these shoots. I absolutely love the snails!