What Does the Fox Say?

When my Facebook friends started posting statuses asking "what does the fox say?" my first response was:

Well, I...I don't know. What does the fox say?

Needless to say, this question led me to youtube in search of the music video. Of course, once you watch the video once, you have to watch it again, right? And again... And again. Whether you like the video or not, the song is definitely catchy. When I asked Becca the big question: what does the fox say? (to which she first replied: gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding) she mentioned that the fox was her sorority's animal of choice.

So when I came across a fox ornament pattern on the internet, I pushed all of my other crafting ideas aside. What a perfect fall-time gift for a fox-loving friend!

The pattern I used came from the Red Heart website. The pattern is free and very easy to follow - you can find it here.

I was lucky to find the colors I needed buried in the bottom of my yarn basket.

Haha, how perfect - Red Heart yarn!

 This was the start of a delightful project. Here are a few snapshots of my work-in-progress.

At this point, I was sure I was making the head.

At this point, I realized I wasn't.

I used safety pins to mark where the nose should go.

I used the end of my crochet hook to stuff the ears, arms, legs and tail.

 

 

At last, all of the pieces!

The pattern was great, and I was very happy with the results it gave me. For my own convenience, though, I changed a couple of things:

I definitely gave up on marking rows. The pattern suggested that I mark the beginning of each row, since the piece is worked in a continuous round. It's a great suggestion, but I got impatient with marking rows and decided to wing it and see what happened. Luckily my guesstimations turned out right.

I also added to the number of stitches I chained for the arms, legs and ears. Working a tight circle with a color so dark and hard to see is not easy. To save myself some time and trouble, I added a stitch to the first round for all the limbs. The extra stitch gave me a little more space to work with; it also gave me slightly larger limbs for the (slightly overstuffed) body. It worked out well in the end.

I was very excited when all of the pieces were finished. All that I needed to do next was attach everything to the body!

An hour later, I realized that I had been overconfident.

Stitching the pieces (especially the arms and the nose) onto the body took a lot more time than I thought it would... And it was tricky. My plastic yarn needle bended in ways I knew it shouldn't have, but amazingly it managed to attach each and every piece securely.

At long last, I wrapped the little scarf around Mr. Fox's neck... Because every fox should be a little bit fancy.

So... What does the fox say?

Crochet!