I saw this pattern last year right after Dinovember and I just KNEW it’d be the perfect thing for the dinosaurs to leave at the end of this year.

Dinosaur Dig

So I made these cute little T-rexes, made a mess of my yarn to set the stage, ordered up some yarn, and started knitting.

I suppose I was overly optimistic. The first one took until May, but it’s SO CUTE:

Dino Dig stocking for Crockett. Unblocked, obv.

Isn’t it the best thing EVER!?!?!

I couldn’t figure out my girl though. Started two different ideas/color schemes , frogged them, started worrying, skipped ahead, and made the obvious choice for D:

I mean, I’m just SO GREAT at photos! 🙄

I somehow managed to only photograph the back, but the other side is way better with the engine and coal car which wrap around with all these cars ending in that cute little caboose (who thankfully doesn’t get loose!) It’s like I got to relive baby D all over again with all his Thomas trains (and songs! Those troublesome trucks!) and Freight Train and The Caboose Who Got Loose and Two Little Trains and all the other railroad books he loved so much.

Steamer Train

And then it was September and I was WAY behind my 2-month-per-stocking plan, so I accepted that C and I would get ours NEXT year. Just had to do Beanies. But man, my girl is HAAAARD to pin down. She …. appreciates … gifts, but I never feel like I’ve guessed correctly. It’s SO HARD to figure her out and I couldn’t settle on a pattern that suited her, so I figured I’d use the other two as templates, and just insert charts of things she likes.

I looked through SO MANY BOOKS. I had SO MANY IDEAS. Morning glories. Butterflies. Hummingbirds. Symmetry. Math. Geometry. Snowflakes. Philosophy. Rowing. Dance? Gradients. Flowers. Music. Stoicism. More math.

Somehow, and I’m still not really sure why, I decided on… epidemiology? I guess?

DNA Helix, Memento Mori skulls, corona virus, stylized immune system, and now I’m working on … brains.

Upside down because I was knitting when I paused to take this pic, and it’s top down. So those blue/white stripes actually are the top.

Rushing/knitting in the dark in the car/early morning before anyone else wakes/changing my mind a million times/second-guessing every decision meant that unfortunately I messed up a million times and kept frogging and redoing. The brains WERE going to be Sierpinski Triangles because she loves math before I decided 1 math with 3 disease things didn’t make sense. (At least the skulls are sort of disease-y in a way.) So I frogged that and am doing the lobes of the brain now. Not sure if I’ll try to race and just gift these 3 this year, or keep working on Beanie’s, also do C’s and mine, and have the Dino’s gift then NEXT year.

Because nothing says happy holidays like dinosaurs, trains, and disease, right?