Chinchilla Mania

So my friend Amy used to have two chinchillas -- Spoon and Jasper. Spoon got knocked up and gave birth to Ivan (who they later found out was a girl). Jasper passed away one extraordinarily hot evening in San Francisco. :(

Recently, Ivan had some health problems and died too (after living 8 years or so, a pretty good run for a chinchilla, though still very sad).

I learned to knit. You've seen the magic scarf below. Then Amy's birthday was coming up and I thought I could knit her a chinchilla. So I made the little knitty baby pictured below -- it came out so well (esp. for my second item) that she asked where I bought it.

She sent me these photos yesterday, which she said was Spoon reenacting the end of "The Velveteen Rabbit". Amy has already loved an eye off of the knitty chinchilla.

You can't tell from the photos, but I used Bernat's Boucle in a heather grey along with some fluffy black-ish yarn to give it chinchilla like fuzzy-ness. There is also a little pom-pom tail which is pretty akin to what a chinchilla tail really looks like.

Spoon will eat sunflower seeds from your fingers if you stick them in the bars of her cage. Knitty Chinchilla doesn't live in the cage, it lives on Amy's bed. Awwwww.