Sabbatical project: Crocheted owl

Decorative owls have been a trend for a while, which seems to be on the wane now. I was willing to wait until they started appearing in the thrift stores, until last year. What happened was that I started being interested in owls and some other things, and eventually realized that I was commemorating my grandma, who died ten years ago. She was a huge influence on me, need I say; growing up next door to her was an enormous blessing.

Artistically speaking, when a theme starts to emerge from seeming randomness, then there is the possibility of intentionally encouraging and reinforcing it, to pull everything together into a coherent and meaningful whole.

Grandma had a number of owls in her house, probably many of them gifts from others. But Grandma and owls definitely go together in my mind. So I went on an owl hunt. Because of limited funds, this mostly meant crafting owls. I have a tub of plaster of Paris, and thought about casting an owl. I thought about painting owls, and carving owls out of wood, and making seed art owls. The owl that I actually made and finished, though, was crocheted from yarn out of our stash.

The yarn was brown, orange, and yellow, and looked like it was left over from some crewel embroidery kit from the Seventies. I added in some other scraps of acrylic yarn.

Crochet hints:

1.  Start from the center of the piece. and work outward.

2.  Shaping is accomplished by using stitches of different heights. From shortest to tallest, in crochet this is: slip stitch, single crochet, half double, double crochet, and triple crochet.*  (Below slip stitch you might put just doing an embroidery whip stitch along the edge of the piece.) I found it helpful to think of lines of stitching that I was working across an area, and varying the stitches within each line to vary its height as needed.

The other element of shaping is choosing where to put the stitches; choosing which stitches to hook into, for more or less density and fullness.

3.  Finer details (such as stripes on feathers) can be achieved by embroidery, using yarn to stitch on the surface.

4.  Some subtlety of color can be given by using multiple strands of yarn at a time, where all the strands are not of the same color. For most of the owl, I used two or three strands of the crewel yarn at a time.

5.  Some mistakes can be covered by embroidery; I originally made the owl's pupils much too large, but was able to cover the excess pupils by embroidering over them carefully with the iris color.

6.  Crochet lends itself well to three-dimensional work, such as for the beak of the owl, and to incorporating other materials...such as a stick for the owl's "perch".

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* These are in American terminology; I have seen European terminology where everything is moved up by one: their single crochet is our slip stitch, and their double crochet is our single, and so on.