Schmancy Olympic Challenge
In January, I entered the Schmancy Olympic Challenge and got assigned the bobsleigh category. It's the first time I've entered one of my designs into a contest of any kind. I'm pleased with my finished object, but I realized when looking at some of the other contestants pictures that I need to buy a light box or light tent to take more professional pictures. You can see the rest of the contestant's entries here. I'm particularly fond of the entry by Herbert and Friends. I don't expect to win.
I got my idea for the design by looking through old winter olympic advertisements. I really liked the look of the poster from the Lake Placid games featuring a bobsled. It's very stylized and I wanted my look to be very minimal, but as usual during the design process my design became very cartoony, partially due to my love of penguins, so I decided that I wanted to really focus on the textures in the piece. I've had a ton of people offer to buy it from me, but I knit this design a couple of times trying to get it perfect, so I'm not really interesting in knitting it again, but I would consider it if someone really, really wanted one. I mostly just do local custom toy orders, but I plan on selling some of my excess toys on Artfire sometime soon. I'm also planning on selling a knitting pattern based on the design. It won't be exactly the same, because I usually knit freeform without making pattern notes, so writing a pattern is kind of daunting for this project.

