Is it the Year of the Emotional Support Dog?

It feels like for several years now the knitting community has been in the throws of its emotional support chicken era. As of this writing the original pattern for the emotional support chicken is the subject of nearly 14,000 projects on Ravelry, which is not even to mention all the people (myself included!) who knit it without sharing on Ravelry about it.

The pattern came out in 2023 and still gets hundreds of visits a day on Ravelry. It’s now available in five languages, so people all over the world can knit their own chickens.

And why not? We need all the emotional support we can get in these trying times (and that’s describing the times incredibly lightly).

But maybe it’s time to retire the emotional support chicken, or at least expand our repertoire of knit comfort animals.

If you’re in the market for a different kind of emotional support knitting project, Lion Brand would like to suggest a dog.

A Dachshund, to be precise.

The Comforting Dachshund knitting patterns uses two colors of DK weight yarn to make a doggie that’s about 13 inches/33 cm long and 5 inches/12.7 cm tall. You could of course use the same pattern for worsted weight yarn and make a bigger dog if that’s a thing you might like.

Because as Dachshund is pretty sausagey in shape, this is a relatively easy knitting pattern with a skill level rating of easy. The face has some shaping but most of the body is just a straight tube, with the ears, tail and legs knit separately.

In fact, all of the pieces are knit separately, including the head and the body, so there are nine pieces in all. They are all worked flat, seamed, stuffed and sewn together. Safety eyes were used in the sample project but you could also embroider eyes if you wanted to make this for a baby.

The Dachshund pattern is available for free from Lion Brand, or you can buy the materials (excluding the eyes) direct from them.

[Photo: Lion Brand]

I guess I must have had this pattern on my mind, because I had chosen this log cabin blanket recipe to write about, promptly forgot about it and a couple of weeks later started knitting a log cabin blanket using all my pink yarn.

It might stay pink if it makes it to baby blanket sized, or I might add in some pastel green and blue, too, to make a bigger blanket. We’ll see. I’m also holding several strands of yarn together to make a kind of bulky yarn, which means it’s deeply satisfying how much yarn is used even as the project is still relatively small.

In Kristen Finlay’s version, DK weight yarn scraps (or fingering/sock yarn held double) are used to make a simple scrappy log cabin blanket that’s lighter weight than my version. Log cabin is a great technique for knitters of any skill level because it’s worked in garter stitch. The only not completely basic technique you need for log cabin knitting is picking up stitches.

If you’ve never worked a log cabin knitting project before, this is a good introduction, and it is really nice to use all your yarn scraps in one big project you’ll use for years to come.

If you use a lot of DK weight yarn you can keep building on it whenever you finish a project, or if you use more worsted weight you can do the same thing with it, it will just be a little bigger starting out than the pattern calls for. How big it gets is totally up to you.

I have really been enjoying working on my log cabin project, and it’s my current sitting at my desk and need a break knit (do you have one of those or is it just me?).

Ready to start your own log cabin blanket knitting project? You can grab the free pattern from Kristen Finlay on Ravelry.

Need more log cabin inspiration? Check out more log cabin knitting patterns.

[Photo: Kristen Finlay]

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