back to the yarn: Easter eggs

I tried the pattern for the Easter eggs in this book:

And I’ve got a lot to share about it!  Firstly, I made 2 of them with more leftover Stylecraft Special DK and some 6in. 3.25mm DPNs that I had lying around (they’re not KnitPicks, but they were OK).  So I wanted to start out with an egg that consists of only 2 colors, not being too confident in my abilities.  Here’s the picture in the book of it:

It’s got hens going around it!  How cute!  Not being too comfortable with DPNs, I was nervous with this ungainly looking beginning:

Even at this point, I was thinking the whole thing might just be a recipe for disaster:

It started to look pretty good, though, and even the back looked pretty decent:

And here’s the finished egg:

I think it turned out great!  A little bigger than I expected, but super-cute.  I had a problem, though, with the increases at the beginning.  Here’s how the book says to do increases:

Have you ever seen that before?  It turned out to be really difficult for me, and very frustrating, so I started using a crochet hook to get into that stitch and pull a loop through.  For my second egg, therefore, I decided to use M1L and M1R increases instead, and it looked almost exactly the same.  Here’s the book’s example of the second egg I made:

And here’s how that one went:

I like it a lot, although perhaps I should have picked more contrasting colors than the pink and blue/green.  Here are the two eggs together:

The second one is a little smaller, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m getting tighter with my DPN skills or if I pulled the yarns too tight when changing colors.  In any case, I love both of them!

I also apologize for the darker pictures — I took the pictures of the eggs at 3AM, right when I finished them, so it was very dark in the house.

That’s all for today, except I want to say thanks to everyone who responded to my last post about rape culture.  It sparked some conversations on and off the Internet, and that’s really what I wanted, so thanks!  And thanks for stopping by again — I’ll be posting again soon!