Awesome Owl - By Stip and Haak

Since my surgery I have spent a fair bit of time at my local yarn shop/knitting cafe WeKnit. It was whilst I was there one day that someone commented on the little arigumi cat sat on the table. It had been made using a free pattern from a website called Stip & Haak, a Dutch website, meaning dot and hook - http://stipenhaak.nl/. 

On closer inspection (and with the clever laptop and google working together to translate) I found a range of patterns for fantastic toys. I fell in love immediately and quickly purchased 4 patterns - opps! (Owl, caterpillar, Hamster and Bear)
I knew I had to start with the owl (owl Floortje). Being a good girl trying to use up the yarn stash rather than add to it, I had a rummage.  I found some Sirdar Folksong that I had purchased in bulk on EBay some time ago (not sure why as I could neither knit or crochet at the time). I picked out a couple of balls of this:

378 Tally Tree

The ball band describes it as a chunky yarn, however we decided it was more of an Aran weight. So, I continued to rumage and found some Nepal by Drops. Some 0612 Medium Brown Mix, 0206 Light Beige Mix and 2923 Goldenrod unused from previous projects and matched these with: 0100 Off White and 1477 Pistachio from WeKnit.

A foot

The Folksong -- became the body.
Light Beige Mix -- became the head.
Goldenrod -- was perfect for the beak and feet.
Medium Brown Mix -- was great to define the eyes and used for the ears.
Pistachio -- became the wings.

It was all getting very exciting. The pattern although it was in English, was written in US Terms and so needed a little conversion before I began, as I so easily get confused. This was easy to do using the 'Find' and 'Replace' feature in Word, I asked it to find sc and replace with dc - voila! The pattern was well written and clear in its instructions.

 It was a great project as I was spurred on by the completion of each part and could see how they would form something resembaling an owl.  Even the joining together seemed relatively easy.

The final product:

I have to say I'm really pleased with how its turned out. Am going to do another (non toy related project) then I think it's time to give the caterpillar a go. I'm thinking in the colours of the hungry caterpillar (I'm a primary school teacher- what do you expect?).

From my experiences with this one, I can't recommend the Stip&Haak patterns enough, they are well written and very reasonably priced. There is even a page with smaller creatures which are free to download.
Check them out:
Here on their website - http://stipenhaak.nl/
Or here on Ravelry - http://www.ravelry.com/designers/stip--haak