Knit a Topsy Turvy Dinosaur

I sometimes feel like I don’t share a lot of knitting patterns that are just fun. I try to offer things that are useful and pretty and that will help you build skills if you need to build skills. Even food-shaped pillows and placemats are useful in a way while they are whimsical.

I shared some basic toys the other day and I want to do more of that, whether you’re knitting for a kid, for yourself or for someone else who hasn’t lost their sense of play.

So in that spirit I bring you this amazing pattern for a dinosaur egg that turns into a triceratops or stegosaurus, your choice.

The design is from Kristy Roberts and the dinosaur is cute enough in its own right for this pattern to be well worth sharing, but the topsy-turvy aspect makes it that much more fun.

(If you check this pattern out on Ravelry you can even see a little gif of the project flipping, which I will admit I watched for longer than I needed to. The still images above give you the idea, though.)

The pattern calls for DK weight yarn, but of course you could use a different weight bearing in mind it will alter the finished size. As is the dino looks fairly small, but the pattern page doesn’t indicate its finished size.

This is definitely a project you could use leftover yarn for, and the designer suggests acrylic just because you can get so many fun colors. No one knows what colors the dinosaurs really were, right?

The project is knit flat and you can see from the photos that the egg flips and goes inside the dino’s stomach, which provides it a bit of stuffing.

You can grab the pattern from the Ravelry link above.

And if you love toys that flip like this, you should definitely check out Susan B. Anderson’s book Topsy-Turvy Inside Out Knit Toys.

[Photo: Kristy Roberts]

Sometimes when I’m scrolling through Ravelry a pattern will catch my eye as much because of the name as the look of the design (which is a little hard to see in those little thumbnails sometimes, anyway).

So it was with the Stellify shawl by Paola Albergamo. Stellify means to turn into a star, and the name and the story behind the shawl come from the story of Ariadne. The better known part of her story is that she helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur, but he then abandoned her. What comes after in many stories is that Dionysus found her, fell in love with her and later married her.

When he threw her jeweled crown into the sky, the Corona Borealis constellation was formed.

What does all this have to do with shawl knitting?

The shawl itself looks like it has a scattering of stars on it, as if it, too, has been stellified. The shawl begins with an I-cord tap and is shaped into a triangular shawl with both lateral and central increases. I-cord edging is incorporated into the sides, and the colorwork is done with mosaic knitting, which means this shawl is easier than it looks.

Mosaic knitting has you working with just one color per row, slipping stitches that appear in the other color to make the colorwork visible. Even better for people new to this kind of colorwork, the pattern includes written and charted instructions throughout so it should be easy to follow along.

The pattern comes in two sizes (the larger one is shown here) and calls for two colors of fingering weight yarn. It looks great in black and yellow, but don’t miss the other projects on Ravelry to see other fun and beautiful color options.

You can find the pattern in English and Italian on Ravelry.

[Photo: Paola Albergamo]

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